... Bad Astronomy . ... Bitesize Astronomy . ... Last week's Snack talked about how black holes can affect the environment around them in such a way as to be very bright . ... It's a common misconception that black holes always have matter swirling into them. ... As this matter gets closer and closer to the black hole it piles up and a large, fairly flat disk forms. This is called the accretion disk , because matter from this disk accretes (that is, falls in) on the black hole. ... 2008 Phil Plait. ...

... On the morning of Thursday, 26 February, amid the Gal pagos Islands, the Sun will fade from view. Not the culmination of ancient prophecy, but none less mystical, Earth's small Moon will be executing a slow slide past the enormous Sun. ... And anyone living in southern North America, Central America, northern South America, or on islands and cruise ships in the Caribbean Sea will, weather permitting, have the opportunity to experience the wonder of a solar eclipse. ...

Educator's Guide to Eclipses . ... In a solar eclipse you observe the Sun (using only safe methods, of course). ... In a lunar eclipse you observe the Moon. ... Because of the geometry described below, you can only view a solar eclipse when the Sun is up, and the Moon is nowhere to be seen. ... Eclipses occur when the Sun, Earth and Moon line up. ... In a solar eclipse the Moon passes directly in front of the Sun. ... In a lunar eclipse the Moon moves into Earth's shadow. ...

... A Time Lapse Lunar Eclipse . ... As the Earth moved between the Moon and the Sun, the Earth's shadow fell on the moon, making it quite dark . In the above picture the Earth's rotation, multiple exposures, and digital enhancements are used to create a time-lapse effect that dramatizes how the Moon looked as it faded out and re-appeared during the three hour lunar eclipse . ... Publications with keywords: lunar eclipse - Sun - Moon . Publications with words: lunar eclipse - Sun - Moon . ...

... 2007 August 26 . A Total Lunar Eclipse Over North Carolina . ... Explanation: This coming Tuesday, our Moon will appear to disappear . A similar total lunar eclipse is seen above in a time lapse image captured in 2003 over North Carolina , USA . ... In the above picture the Earth's rotation, multiple exposures, and digital enhancements are used to create a time-lapse effect that dramatizes how the Moon looked as it faded out and re-appeared during the three hour lunar eclipse . ...

The Sun's corona . ... For instance, short "plumes" rising from the polar regions of the Sun look very much like field lines coming out of the end of a bar magnet, and they therefore suggest that the Sun, in addition to the intense fields of sunspots, also has a global magnetic field like the Earth's. Arches above the . Sun's surface . ... It is brightest near sunspots, whose arched field lines apparently hamper the outflow of solar wind which carries away energy and helps cool the corona. ...

... Fig. ... One of these is a pink-coloured solar prominence, a tongue of incandescent hydrogen gas spewing out of the obstructed solar disc, visible at the 2 o'clock position. ... Such an eclipse was predicted to be visible from deep within the Asian continent on the 1st August 2008. ... A pink-coloured prominence was visible right from the onset (Fig. 1), while several streamers appeared to emanate from the obstructed solar disk throughout the event (Fig. ... Last Revised: 2008 September 8th . ...

... Gift Center . ... Why do aurorae appear strongest within rings centered on Earth's poles instead of filled-in circles? ... RELATED TOPICS: AURORAE . The visible aurorae result from electrons that move along magnetic field lines from space into the upper atmosphere. ... Just make sure you're registered with the website. Get instant access to subscriber content on Astronomy.com! ... If you are already registered on Astronomy.com, please log in below. ...

... The Round Earth . ... Aristarchus around 270 BC derived the Moon's distance from the duration of a lunar eclipse (Hipparchus later found an independent method). ... Let R be the radius of that circle and T the time it takes the Moon to go around once, about one month. ... Viewed from Earth, a "new Moon" (occuring between the time a thin crescent is last seen before sunrise and the time one is seen shortly after sunset) happens when the Moon in its apparent motion around the sky overtakes the Sun. ...

... The WFPC2 CCDs have a small b ut significant charge transfer efficiency (CTE) problem which causes some signal to be lost when charge is transferred down the chip during readout. This has the effect of making objects at higher row numbers (more charge transfers) appear fainter than they would if they were at low row numbers. The effect depends on the temperature of the CCDs. ... It is also possible that proportional losses for fainter stars, at least with no background, may be larger. ...

... The Earth's surface receives more light per unit area. ... The Earth is closer to the Sun. ... At what time does the Third Quarter Moon rise? a) 9:00 AM b) 12:00 Noon c) 9:00 PM $d) 12:00 Midnight When the moon is in its last quarter , when does it rise and set? a) sunrise, sunset b) sunset, sunrise $c) midnight, noon d) noon, midnight Why don't lunar eclipses happen at every full moon ? $a) The Moon 's orbit doesn't always take it through the Earth's shadow. b) The Moon 's ...

... Moon Phase below . ... ARTICLE: Why the moon always shows us the same face . ... Before you continue reading, you should know that this was not always the case, i.e. the Moon once was rotating with respect to the Earth, so that on every night a terrestrial observer (if there was one, because this was long, long before mankind appeared on our planet, and even before any major animals had appeared) saw another face of the Moon. ... Figure 1 (not to scale) shows how we can imagine the system Earth-Moon...

... V838 Mon is a member of a new class of eruptive variables which appear as a peculiar novae having late K-M type spectra in their outburst. Before its outburst, it was a wide binary system of B3V type stars. ... The B3V companion was seen in the outburst in the UV spectrum taken with HST (Rauch et al., ... In the latest spectra, the light of B3V companion was predominating in the short-wave photometric bands. ... CCD blue frames of V838 Mon before the eclipse (left) and in the eclipse (right). ...

... The discovery of this radiopulsar is potentially important not only for confirming the theory of evolution of NS, but also for understanding processes occurring in stellar winds   from normal stars. After all, a radiopulsar orbiting in the semi-transparent stellar wind of a normal star is a sort of probe scanning an inhomogeneous plasma by pulsed radiation (Lipunov and Prokhorov, 1984)[ 110 ]. ... 1) absorption of radio waves (light curve); . ... This object is a radiopulsar orbiting a Be-star. ...

... This year's eclipse is unique in duration. ... Although, at the present time, there are 6 solar observatories belonging to leading space agencies in orbit around the Earth, the eclipse of 22 July, 2009, will only be seen by two of them: the Russian CORONAS-PHOTON satellite equipped with TESIS telescopes and Japan's HINODE satellite fitted with an XRT space telescope. ... TESIS will be the first of the two devices (and the very first on Earth) to witness the solar eclipse. ...

Pulsars (from PULSAting stARs) were discovered, albeit accidentally, by Jocelyn Bell at Cambridge in 1967. ... In addition, some pulsars are known to be members of binary systems in which the companion is another neutron star, a white dwarf and even a main sequence star. ... PSR B1913+16: . ... Although subsequent pulsar surveys with better sensitivity to short period objects have found a large number of similar objects, for 24 years PSR B1937+21 stayed as the most rapidly rotating neutron star known. ...

... Spherical aberration, coma, and astigmatism are also easily observed using the star test. ... Off-axis images are complex. ... Fig. ... Diffraction by a circular aperture as a function of defocus for no aberration Airy Disk 1 wave defocus Less than 1 wave defocus Fig. ... Diffraction by a circular aperture as a function of defocus for third-order spherical aberration Paraxial Focus Small distance inside paraxial focus Moderate distance from marginal focus Immediate neighborhood of marginal focus Fig...

ALBUM: floating Artist: Eloy @ SONG : Floating Instrumental @ SONG : The Light From Deep Darkness Out of the depth of nothing In nobobdy's time The earth was created The first morning starts Sun appears in the sky Winds stroking waves Evening shadows tumble down Eclipse the sun of life Herald the night Burning lights arise people take their places Dance a merry round They live without fear Help each other in their way through life Tomorrow we'll see They forget ...

... We present a computer program for modelling energy flux distribution and light curves of eclipsing binaries from far ultraviolet to infrared regions. The Roche model is assumed. Proximity effects of components (reflection of radiation and surface gravity darkening) are taken into account. ... Figure 1: The surface temperature distribution for Algol A-B system before (upper plot) and after (lower plot) correction for temperature due to the irradiation effect. ...

Natural Satellites Service. ... Mutual occultations and eclipses . of the major satellites of Uranus . ... We present the ephemerides and circumstances of the mutual occultations and eclipses of the major Uranian satellites in 2006-2010. ... In 2006-2010 about 190 mutual occultations and eclipses will occur. ... The ephemerides of the mutual occultations and eclipses of the major satellites of Uranus in 2006-2010 are presented in four tables according to four periods of visibility of Uranus. ...