An extremely active stellar nursery glows in deep reddish tones in this Gemini view of NGC 2467 in the southern constellation of Puppis. The image displays a striking array of features that illustrate multiple phases of star birth. In the lower right, young stars are emitting hot radiation, exciting the nearby gas and causing it to glow and revealing denser gas and dust clouds. Dust lanes and dark globules mark sites of future star formation. A cluster of young stars dominates the left edge of the field of view.

These images are of the central region of NGC 6934, a globular cluster located 50,000 light years from Earth. Globular clusters are extremely dense stellar environments that typically contain between one hundred thousand to one million stars. The density of these star cities presents us with a wealth of information on stars of all sizes but also presents a great challenge: how can we peer into the very heart of such a dense star cluster?

Remarkable details in the core of the globular cluster M-13 are revealed in a new image obtained with the Gemini Observatory's new Altair adaptive optics system at the Frederick C. Gillett Telescope (Gemini North) on Hawaii's Mauna Kea. The razor-sharp Gemini image is shown in the upper right of the above sequence that also includes a wide-field view of the cluster (and blow-up of the core) as imaged by the Canada-France-Hawai`i Telescope also on Mauna Kea.

Pluto and its moon Charon are shown in this sequence of four infrared images obtained on different nights during June 1999 at Gemini, utilizing the University of Hawaii's infrared camera QUIRC and adaptive optics (AO) system, Hokupa'a. The AO system uses a flexible mirror to compensate for distortions caused by the earth's atmosphere and allows images which are as sharp as possible to be recordedat this wavelength. Pluto, the most distant planet in our solar system, was discovered by American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh in 1930.

This image is a merger of the two images (adjacent in this album) that highlights the brown dwarf image around Sge 15 that was revealed for the first time by Gemini.

The Gemini North Telescope using the University of Hawaii's Hokupa'a adaptive optics system found a very faint companion orbiting around 15 Sge (left). The same Gemini data have been processed to show the brown dwarf companion more clearly (right). The brown dwarf lies only 0.8 arc seconds from the primary. (The fainter ripples are artifacts of the image processing.) The brown dwarf is located at about the 7:00 position on these images. Gemini-North adaptive optics image of 15 Sge and its newly found companion (15 Sge B).

The object, known by the unglamorous name of IRS8, was only an ill-defined smudge until Gemini came along. Now, the Gemini telescope's advanced optics show that IRS8 appears to be a star that is plowing through a poorly understood gas and dust cloud near the galactic center. Moving relative to the cloud, the star creates a very obvious bow-shock wave, similar to the wave that forms in front of a boat as it goes through water.

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Adaptive optics compensated field in region around the Galactic Center. The stellar density in this region is about 300,000 times that of our neighborhood of the galaxy.

With more clarity than is possible even with the Hubble Space Telescope, this infrared image of the Arches Cluster is the sharpest image ever taken of this cluster, which is located less than 100 light years from the center of our galaxy. The cluster is so densely packed that 300,000 of its stars would fill the empty space between our sun and our nearest stellar neighbor Alpha Centauri, 4.3 light years away. Gemini's unique capabilities allowed the telescope on Hawaii's Mauna Kea to image this cluster at an unprecedented clarity.

This extremely high resolution image of the region around the galactic center (at lower right) shows new details including a bow-shock structure in an infrared source called IRS-8 (see close-up on this album).

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