ESA ESO: Chicken space dust cloud

With bright glowing eyes and a swirl of crimson, the chicken concealed in the Lambda Centauri nebula looks ready to pummel some pigs in a game of Angry Birds.

The new shot from the European Southern Observatory shows hot newborn stars that formed from hydrogen gas clouds glowing brightly with ultraviolet light.

The intense radiation excites the hydrogen cloud, making it glow red.

Visible against the red clouds, black clumps called Bok globules dot the frame and conceal stars within.

Known playfully as the "running chicken" nebula, the bird's roost is some 6500 light years from Earth in the constellation Centaurus. But where does the chicken end? If you think you can make out its exact outline, submit your guess to the observatory's Flickr group for a chance at a prize.

NASA: Centaur Moon Impact produces disappointing result

In the final minutes of its plunge toward the moon, NASA's LCROSS spacecraft spotted the brief infrared flash of a rocket booster hitting the lunar surface just ahead of it – and it even saw heat from the crater formed by the impact.

But scientists remain puzzled and disappointed about why the event did not seem to generate a visible plume of debris as expected.

As hundreds of telescopes and observers watched, the highly publicised NASA mission to search for water on the moon reached its grand finale at 0431 PDT (1131 GMT) with a pair of high-speed crashes into a lunar crater named Cabeus.

During the crucial moments at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, scientists and engineers with LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite) peered in silent concentration as successive images of the crater grew larger on their screens.

Spectroscopic hints
Nearby, some 500 bleary-eyed visitors that had gathered overnight outside mission control were watching the same pictures on a giant outdoor screen.

Yet, immediately after the scheduled impact time, there was no obvious sign of the spectacular explosion that many were expecting. "Impacting into the moon is an unpredictable business at best," Anthony Colaprete, principal investigator for LCROSS, said in a post-impact briefing.

Colaprete did not offer definitive word as to why the visual camera apparently did not detect the event but added there were interesting changes in spectroscopic data taken by the spacecraft that might have been produced by a debris cloud. "I'm not convinced that the ejecta is not in the data yet," he said.

NASA Centaur Spacecraft on collision course with Moon

Two NASA spacecraft are barreling toward the moon at twice the speed of a bullet, about to crash into a lunar crater in a search for ice.

If all goes well, the impact will be beamed back live to Earth.

The first and much bigger crash is set for 7:31 a.m. EDT. That's when an empty rocket that weighs 2.2 tons should hit the crater Cabeus and create a minicrater about half the size of an Olympic pool. It should kick up a plume of lunar debris about six miles high.

The idea is to confirm the theory that water — a key resource if people are going to go back to the moon — is hidden below the barren moonscape.

Trailing behind the rocket is the lunar probe LCROSS, short for Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite and pronounced L-Cross, beaming back to Earth live pictures of the impact and the debris plume using color cameras. It will scour for ice, fly through the debris cloud and then just four minutes later take the fatal plunge itself, triggering a dust storm one-third the size of the first hit.

Telescopes around the world — including the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope — will aim their cameras at the big event to provide more views of the dust-up.