Whatever floats your ‘scope ⁣ ⁣ The Super Pressure Balloon Imaging Telescope (SuperBIT) that launched on a scientific super pressure balloon on April 15, 2023, from New Zealand captured its first research images of the Tarantula and Antennae galaxies. Using a balloon-borne telescope, floating at 108,000 feet (32,918 meters) above Earth’s surface, allows scientists to view these scientific targets from a balloon platform in a near-space environment.⁣ ⁣ The SuperBIT telescope captures images of galaxies in the visible to near ultraviolet light spectrum, which is within the NASAHubble capabilities, but with a wider field of view. The goal of the mission is to map dark matter around galaxy clusters by measuring the way these massive objects warp the space around them, also called “weak gravitational lensing.” ⁣ ⁣ Image descriptions: ⁣ ⁣ 1 – The Tarantula nebula is pictured in shades of red and magenta. It is a large star-forming region of ionized gas that lies 161,000 light-years from Ear...