The festive season has arrived for astronomers at the European Southern Observatory (ESO), of which the U.K.'s Science and Technology Facilities Council is a partner, in the form of a dramatic new image.

This image shows the swirling gas around a region known as NGC 2264, an area of sky that includes the sparkling blue baubles of the Christmas Tree star cluster. NGC 2264 lies about 2600 light-years from Earth in the obscure constellation of Monoceros, the Unicorn, not far from the more familiar figure of Orion, the Hunter. The image shows a region of space about 30 light-years across.

NGC 2264 was first discovered by William Herschel during his great sky surveys in the late 18th century. He first noticed the bright cluster in January 1784 and the brightest part of the visually more elusive smudge of the glowing gas clouds at Christmas nearly two years later. Stunning images such as this and the wonders of astronomy will be the focus of a global celebration next year — the International Year of Astronomy 2009 (IYA2009). With the participation of 140 countries worldwide, and with events taking place nationally, regionally and globally throughout the year, IYA2009 will allow people to observe first hand some of the amazing celestial bodies that make up our Universe and also will provide a wide variety of events and projects, from touring astronomy exhibitions to virtual blog interactions with practicing astronomers.


Herschel's work will also be commemorated next year with the launch of the European Space Agency's (ESA) Herschel and Planck missions. Herschel is a multi purpose space observatory in dual launch configuration with Planck. The spacecraft will view the Universe in the far infrared and sub-millimetre wavelength bands and will be able to observe dust obscured and cold objects that are invisible to other telescopes. It will allow astronomers to study the process of how stars form and evolve and will look at how galaxies formed in the early Universe on a grand scale. Planck is a cosmology science mission that will analyse, with the highest accuracy ever achieved, the remnants of the radiation that filled the Universe immediately after the Big Bang, which we observe today as the Cosmic Microwave Background. It will provide answers to one of the most important sets of questions asked in modern science - how did the Universe begin, how did it evolve to the state we observe today, and how will it continue to evolve in the future.

(Image credits: ESO — The picture, top, of NGC 2264, including the Christmas Tree Cluster, was created from images taken with the Wide Field Imager (WFI), a specialised astronomical camera attached to the 2.2-metre Max-Planck Society/ESO telescope at the La Silla observatory in Chile. Located nearly 2400 m above sea level, in the mountains of the Atacama Desert, ESO's La Silla enjoys some of the clearest and darkest skies on the whole planet, making the site ideally suited for studying the farthest depths of the Universe. To make this image, the WFI stared at the cluster for more than ten hours through a series of specialist filters to build up a full colour image of the billowing clouds of fluorescing hydrogen gas.

The poster images, below, are ESA designed posters for the Herschel and Planck missions)



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