Astronotes Armagh Planetarium's Stellar Blog! ... Stars . ... Monthly Sky Notes . ... Posted on January 30, 2012 | 1 Comment If you look towards the west just after sunset this February you will see a very bright star in the darkening sky. ... Continue Reading.. ... Posted on December 5, 2011 | 4 Comments Which is the brightest star in the sky (apart from the Sun)? ... Posted on November 10, 2011 | 19 Comments What was the Star of Bethlehem? ... Posted on October 10, 2011 | ...

... The two bright meteors flashing through this night skyscape from August 7 are part of the ongoing Perseid meteor shower. ... Similar in size and grand design to our own Milky Way, spiral galaxy NGC 3370 lies about 100 million light-years away toward the constellation Leo. ... The most striking is NGC 3718, the warped spiral galaxy near picture center. ... The Great Spiral Galaxy in Andromeda (aka M31), a mere 2.5 million light-years distant, is the closest large spiral to our own Milky Way. ...

... 2012 August 10 . Perseid Below . Credit: Ron Garan, ISS Expedition 28 Crew , NASA . Explanation: Denizens of planet Earth watched last year's Perseid meteor shower by looking up into the bright moonlit night sky . ... From Garan's perspective onboard the International Space Station orbiting at an altitude of about 380 kilometers, the Perseid meteors streak below, swept up dust left from comet Swift-Tuttle heated to incandescence. ... Want to look up at this year's Perseid meteor shower? ...

... Armagh Observatory, College Hill, Armagh BT61 9DG, +44 (0)28 3752 2928 . ... A bright nova has recently been discovered in the constellation of Delphinus (The Dolphin). ... The nova was confirmed late on August 14 at a magnitude of 6.3 (in a dark sky the faintest naked-eye stars are approximately 6.0 magnitudes - the lower the magnitude the brighter a star). ... Nova explosions occur in binary systems composed of a star similar to our Sun but only ~1/10 of its mass, and a star called a white dwarf. ...

... August 30, 1999 . Looking Back on an Eclipsed Earth . ... Explanation: Here is what the Earth looks like during a solar eclipse. ... Only observers near the center of the dark circle see a total solar eclipse - others see a partial eclipse where only part of the Sun appears blocked by the Moon . This spectacular picture of the 1999 August 11 solar eclipse was one of the last ever taken from the Mir space station , as Mir is being decommissioned after more than ten years of productive use. ...

... It's a Meteor Shower Smaller than grains of sand, meteors vaporize in a bright streak of light as they hit Earth's atmosphere. Meteor showers come from comets, but the sporadic meteors on other nights are mostly asteroid bits. ... Meteor Showers Come From Comets Jupiter Earth Sun Comet Mercury Tips: A bright Moon can wash out meteors, making them hard to see. ... But the comet bits hit Earth's atmosphere so fast, the pieces vaporize in bright streaks -- making a meteor shower! ...

... What's New? Bad Astronomy . ... August 24, 2005 . ... That says Mars will be closer to the Earth on August 27th than it has in 5000 years, and it may be 2267 until it gets this big again? ... Mars won't be closest in August, it won't be as big as the full Moon, and it was actually closer back in 2003. ... It's a near-exact duplicate of an email sent around the internets back in 2003, August 2003 , to be exact, when Mars really did have a close apparition with the Earth. ... 2008 Phil Plait. ...

... It sustains all life on Earth and it can be very harmful to stay out in it for too long. To study the Sun, astronomers have built special telescopes to safely view it. ... We call these stars solar twins . ... Studying these rare solar twins allows astronomers to see what our star used to be like, and what it will be like in the future. Not very far from Earth (compared to the huge vastness of space) astronomers have just discovered the oldest solar twin ever! ...

Summer Triangle . Articles | ... As dusk deepens into night in early June, look a bit north of east, not real high in the sky, for a sparkling blue-white star, whose name is Vega . ... Since the stars rise some four minutes earlier with each passing day, expect the stars of the Summer Triangle to light up the twilight dusk around middle to late June -- a sure harbinger of the change of seasons, of spring giving way to summer. ... Re-published on Astronomy Net with permission of the author. ...

MAIN PAGE . ... Nova Cygni August 1975! ... 1975/76: Comet West! ... Dr. Richard West (4th from left) & AAL members visiting SES Betzdorf on occasion of our club's 25th anniversary - October 1996 . Comet West Information . ... It was the brightest comet visible from Earth since Comet West in 1976. ... 1997: Comet Hale-Bopp! ... Thus Comet Hale-Bopp never got closer to Earth than Earth gets to the Sun. ... Comet Hale-Bopp JPL Page . ... 1999: Total solar eclipse over Luxembourg! ...

... It is 1st August, and you are hoping to observe a number of bright galaxies from a catalogue. ... You used the normal Vega magnitude scale. You now want to compare your B-K colour against the published colours of another, supposedly similar star you found in the literature. Your colour: B-K = 3.43 Literature colour: B-K = 3.41 Unfortunately, when you read the small-print in the literature paper, you found that the published colour used AB-magnitudes, not Vega magnitudes. ...

In this gallery are many images of Low Surface Brightness Galaxies which have recently been discovered and analyzed. ... The central surface brightness of this galaxy is 24.28 . Malin 2 This galaxy is another huge disk galaxy with a scale length of 15 kpc and a redshift of 15000 km/a. The high surface brightness knot in one of its spiral arms actually has the same color, luminosity and H-alpha equivalent width as the entire Large Magellanic Cloud . ... Truly it is a Low Surface Brightness Galaxy. ...

... I spent most of the day trying yo get drizzlepac to build, with a lot of help with Megan. It builds now, but still fails most of its tests. ... I finished writing calc_pixmap, which creates an image mapping the pixels of one image into another and then wrote the first test case, which I am trying to get to run. ... I have finished the first set of unit tests and am trying to get them to build. ... I wrote the C and Python code to wrap the unit tests and the Python test case to invoke it. ...

Old subtables of the extended ``HIPASS Bright Galaxy Catalog'' . ... Koribalski, Staveley-Smith, Kilborn, + HIPASS/ZOA teams 2004, AJ 128, 16 . The 1000 Brightest HIPASS Galaxies: HI Properties . ... The 1000 Brightest HIPASS Galaxies: The HI Mass Function . ... The 1000 Brightest HIPASS Galaxies: Newly Cataloged Galaxies . ... To download the gzipped ps-file click here . ... The Brightest Galaxies from HIPASS . Presented is the distribution of the 700 brightest HIPASS galaxies. ...

... Tonight's Sky . ... The Magazine . ... Observing . ... Magazine . ... Gravitational wave search provides insights into galaxy evolution and mergers . ... The double star 54 Leonis, spiral galaxy NGC 3198, and emission nebula NGC 3199 . ... Astronomy for Kids . ... Neptune glows at its brightest . ... Get instant access to subscriber content on Astronomy.com! ... Receive news, sky-event information, observing tips, and more from Astronomy's weekly email newsletter. ... Astronomy Magazine . ...

Bright Supernova - Archives On these pages you will find references to Supernovae which have faded into oblivion. ... Finally, in 1999, when I took over the International Supernova Network's Latest Supernovae page I retitled the main page "Latest Supernovae", BUT, it's the "Latest Supernovae" page of the "Bright Supernovae" pages which are also sub-pages of ISN. ... Brightest supernova in 2005 . ... Brightest supernova in 2002 . ... Brightest supernova in 2000 . ... Brightest supernova in 1999 . ...

Kholtygin A., Brown J., Fabrika S., Surkov A. Magnetic field connected fast line profile variability in spectra of bright O supergiants . ... Conference, held in the Special Astrophysical Observatory of the Russian AS, August 27-31, 2003, Eds.: Yu. ... Results of a study of fast line profile variability ( lpv ) in spectra of selected bright O-stars are reported. ... In the context of testing the MCWS model a program of searching for weak magnetic fields in bright O and early B stars is outlined. ...

A closer look at the pole star and the neighboring . constellations, especially the Big Dipper and Cassiopeia . ... This lesson plan supplements: "Finding the Pole Star," section #1a: on disk Spolaris.htm , on the web . ... Know the constellations of the Big Dipper and Cassiopeia, and their use in finding the Pole Star. ... Why do you think Alaska chose the pole star and the Big Dipper to be on its flag? ... You will probably never see there the pole star and rarely see the Big Dipper.) ...

Locating Uranus and Neptune in the constellation Capricornus for fall 1999 Alpha Theta Beta Rho Pi Omicron Sigma Key: Magnitudes 3 4 5 6 7 8 Uranus (mag 5.7) Neptune (mag 7.9) Shown for 5-Oct-99, but positions wont change much until mid-November Using binoculars, you should be able to locate Uranus and possibly Neptune using the chart above, even from the light polluted suburbs of Boston. ... Once you find Sigma, look further in the same direction and youll see Neptune. ...

The form on this Web page allows specifying a celestial position for which the full 4x4 degree NVSS FITS image is desired. ... Other services of the NVSS survey include: . ... NVSS Postage stamp (small FITS or jpeg file) server . direct ftp to NVSS 4x4 deg. FITS image and documentation server . NVSS source catalog and software ftp server - but please note that you will need to schedule an overnight job for a quiet time slot to download the 150Mb CATALOG.FIT file to avoid timeouts etc. ...