BellaOnline Forums Education Astronomy Hydra the Water Snake – Deep Sky Objects *new*

It's not surprising to find plenty of deep-sky objects in such a big constellation as Hydra. Its varied objects include the Ghost of Jupiter, beautiful globules that are over twice the age of the Sun, and a dramatic grand design spiral galaxy known for its titanic explosions.

Hydra the Water Snake – Deep Sky Objects

Here is a modern picture of NGC 3242 the Ghost of Jupiter in the constellation Hydra. (Image credit: Rainer Sparenberg, Stefan Binnewies, Volker Robering)

In the late 18th century William Herschel discovered this nebula. In his telescope he could see a planet-like disk and the color. It would have have appeared to be about the size of Jupiter in the late 18th/early 19th centuries. It's actually vastly bigger than Jupiter and greatly farther away.

Here's a more detailed view of NGC 3242 from the Hubble Space telescope. You can even see the dying star that is creating the nebula.

NGC 5694, nicknamed Tombaugh's Cluster, is a globular cluster over 100,000 light years away and nearly 12 billion years old. William Herschel discovered it in 1784, but didn't recognize what it was, nor did anyone else for nearly 150 years. The discoverer of Pluto Clyde Tombaugh was the first to recognize it as a globular cluster.

One of Hydra's gems is M83, the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy, an exquisite spiral galaxy. It was discovered by the great French astronomer Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille in his study of the southern skies from the Cape of Good Hope.

M83 is known for its high rate of supernovae, with six having been seen there since 1945. (The last supernova seen in our Milky Way was in 1680.)

This composite image of the Hydra A galaxy cluster shows 10-million-degree gas. It was observed by NASA's X-ray satellite Chandra in blue, and jets of radio emission observed by the Very Large Array are in pink. Optical data (in yellow) from the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope and the Digitized Sky Survey shows galaxies in the cluster.

Click to see the three images separately.

Have a look at this beautiful image of the Hydra Galaxy Cluster. (Image Credit & Copyright: Angus Lau)

The two really bright objects are foreground stars in our galaxy. The galaxies in the background are over 100 million light years away. The three most prominent galaxies in the cluster are the blue spiral NGC 3312 and two yellow elliptical galaxies NGC 3311 & NGC 3309. All three of them are around 150,000 light years in diameter. That's bigger than the Milky Way.

The image shows a region around 1.3 million light years across.

The Hydra Cluster is part of the Hydra-Centaurus Supercluster.