During the last week Chandra completed the observing schedule as planned.

Chandra press and image releases were issued on Jun 21 describing observations of the vicinity of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole (SMBH) at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, from Chandra and from NASA’s IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer). Data from the two satellites combine to reveal part of the outburst history of the currently quiescent SMBH as revealed by the effects on nearby molecular clouds. The evidence points to an intense, brief flare occurring about 200 years ago. For details see: https://chandra.harvard.edu/press/23_releases/press_062123.html

A Chandra image release was issued on Jun 20 describing the release of "sonifications" of three new objects: R Aquarii (a white dwarf and a red giant in orbit around each other), Stephan's Quintet (a group of four galaxies in close proximity), and Messier 104 (a large edge-on galaxy in the Virgo cluster). In the past few years, a sonification project has transformed digital astronomical data from some of the world's most powerful telescopes into sound, with each sonification generating a unique acoustic representation of an astronomical image. For details see https://chandra.si.edu/photo/2023/sonify7/

The schedule of targets for the next week is shown below.