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| | | | | | | | | Thackeray's Globules in IC 2944 | |
3 January
2002: On 3 January 2002, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope team released an image of strangely glowing dark clouds - known as 'globules' - silhouetted against against the red glow of hydrogen gas and bright stars in a busy star forming region, IC 2944.
The hydrogen-emission image that clearly shows the outline of the dark globules was taken in February 1999 with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2).
Additional images that helped to establish the true colour of the stars in the field were taken by the Hubble Heritage Team in February 2001. The composite result is a four-colour image of the red, green, blue and H-alpha filters.
1906: On 3 January 1906, William Wilson Morgan was born.
Morgan was an American astronomer who, in 1951, provided the first evidence that the Milky Way galaxy has spiral arms. He spent his entire career at the Yerkes Observatory, including three years as director.
His research was devoted to morphology, the classification of objects by their form and structure. With Keenan and Kellman, he introduced stellar luminosity classes and the two-dimensional classification of stellar spectra strictly based on the spectra themselves.
With Osterbrock and Sharpless he demonstrated the existence of spiral arms in the Galaxy using precise distances of O and B stars obtained from spectral classifications. Morgan invented the UBV system of magnitudes and colours.
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