Happy Holidays from NOIRLab!

Happy Holidays from NOIRLab!

Merry Christmas from FriendsofNASA.org!

Happy Holidays, Felices Fiestas, and Mele Kalikimaka and Hau‘oli Makahiki Hou!

We at the National Science Foundation's NOIRLab would like to wish you the best this holiday season, and a peaceful and successful 2024!

Through its five programs—Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), the Community Science and Data Center (CSDC), the International Gemini Observatory, Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO) and  Vera C. Rubin Observatory once operational—NOIRLab supports scientific programs. The lab’s infrastructure enables the astronomy community to advance humanity’s understanding of the Universe by exploring significant areas of astrophysics, including dark energy and dark matter, galaxies and quasars, the Milky Way, exoplanets, and small bodies in our own Solar System.

The background image is the nebula LBN 867, known as the Raspberry Nebula, located in the constellation Orion. It was captured by the Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope using the Mosaic-3 detector at Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO), a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab.

The Nicholas U. Mayall Telescope is a four-meter (158 inches) reflector telescope in Arizona named after the American observational astronomer of the same name. The telescope saw first light on February 27, 1973, and was the second-largest in the world at that time.

Credit: 

Background image: KPNO/NOIRLab/NSD/T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF’s NOIRLab)

Release Date: Dec. 6, 2023

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