... Comet Hyakutake's Closest Approach . ... Comet Hyakutake's Past and Future . ... The above false-color picture of Comet Hyakutake taken just two days ago shows its rapidly developing tail. The comet now has a substantial coma with a bright center, lending it a dramatic eye-like appearance. ... Near Comet Hyakutake's Nucleus . ... This March 19th false-color picture of Comet Hyakutake from one of the most sophisticated ground based telescopes captures the area surrounding the comet's nucleus. ...

... 2001 December 24 . Asteroid 1998 WT24 Passes Near Earth . ... Passing well outside the orbit of our Moon, Asteroid 1998 WT24 posed no danger, but became bright enough to see with binoculars and to track with radar . ... Every few years, an asteroid will actually pass inside the orbit of the Moon. Large impact features on the Earth are testaments to asteroids or comets that actually impacted the Earth in the distant past. ... About APOD | ...

... An artificial comet holds secrets to Earths life . ... Astronomers recently discovered that Scholz's star passed close to the Sun 70,000 years ago. Wouldn't its gravity have sent Oort Cloud comets raining into the inner planets? ... COMETS | OORT CLOUD . Based on the number of long-period comets that enter the inner solar system, astronomers estimate there are probably trillions of them in the Oort Cloud. Get instant access to subscriber content on Astronomy.com! ... Discover | ...

I was wondering what conditions should be met to have the "darkest" sky .. ... Upon the above publication of the Southern Galactic hemisphere, TunГ Tezel started seeking opportunities to create the Northern counterpart image. ... So, the initial quest of having the darkest possible sky have delivered us these two all-sky images of the two galactic hemispheres as seen from Planet Earth. Zoomable and 'full-screenable' fisheye view of the "darkest sky" Southern Galactic Hemisphere image. ...

... September 9, 1999 . Comet Hale-Bopp Over the Superstition Mountains . ... Explanation: Four years ago, Comet Hale-Bopp was discovered out near Jupiter falling toward the inner Solar System . ... Above, Comet Hale-Bopp was photographed in 1997 behind the Superstition Mountains in Arizona . Clearly visible are the comets white dust tail that shines by reflected sunlight, and the blue ion tail that shines by glowing gas. ... About APOD > . ...

... STScI-PRC95-45a CRUCIBLE OF CREATION: PANORAMIC HUBBLE MOSAIC ZOOMS IN ON MAELSTROM OF STAR BIRTH This spectacular color panorama of the center the Orion nebula is one of the largest pictures ever assembled from individual images taken with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. ... Though this 2.5 light-years wide view is still a small portion of the entire nebula, it includes almost all of the light from the bright glowing clouds of gas and a star cluster associated with the nebula. ...

Astronotes Armagh Planetarium's Stellar Blog! ... Our Galaxy . Milky Way . Stars . ... Other Galaxies . ... Barred spiral galaxy NGC 6744 is located in a constellation of the southern hemisphereтАЩs sky, called Pavo (Latin for peacock). At a distance from our Solar System of about 30 million light years, NGC 6744 is not only one of the closest spiral galaxies but is thought to be one of the visible galaxies most like our own Milky Way. Is it our cosmic doppelganger? ...

... Armagh Observatory, College Hill, Armagh BT61 9DG, +44 (0)28 3752 2928 . ... Risks Comparable to NEOs . ... The Increasing Rate of Discovery of Asteroids . ... Comet and Asteroid Collision Probabilities . ... Extreme albedo comets and the impact hazard (PDF Format) . ... Asteroid Impact Animations . ... Workshop on Scientific Requirements for Mitigation of Hazardous Comets and Asteroids - 2002 . ... The Spaceguard Survey Report, 1992 (PDF) . Tsunami from Asteroid/Comet Impacts . ...

Various types of stars have dust around them. In the well known case of the Pleiades the dust around the stars is unrelated to the stars, and is instead dust from an interstellar cloud that the Pleiades cluster has drifted into on its way through the galactic disk. ... The dust in interstellar space is observed in a variety of ways: due to its passive absorption of starlight ("extinction"), by its production of polarization in starlight, and then at long wavelengths due to its thermal radiation. ...

Most of these images were obtained by Mike Bessell, Michelle Buxton, Hwankyung Sung, Ralph Sutherland and Bob Watson at SSO using a 2Kx2K Site CCD behind a Nikon or Hasselblad lens or directly on the 1m telescope. A few images are from the Hubble Space Telescope. Some of the M42 images were obtained with the KPNO 1m and ESO NTT telescope. One image is a mosaic of IRAS images. ... Details of the CCD imaging program at MSSSO. ... antenna.jpg (53KB) . ... ngc6744.jpg (59KB) . ...

... Imaging techniques III: the Large Magellanic Cloud . ... The two images above show the neutral hydrogen (HI) distribution of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a close neighbour of our Milky Way, using data from the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) on the left and a combination of Parkes and ATCA HI data on the right. An interferometer - like the ATCA - acts like a filter. ... today * ATNF | Parkes | ATCA | ...

... Edward L. (Ned) Wright received his AB and PhD degrees from Harvard University, and was a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows. ... Prof. Wright is interested in infrared astronomy and cosmology. ... He has been working on the COsmic Background Explorer ( COBE ) since 1978. ... Wright, E. L. 2000, ApJ submitted, "DIRBE Minus 2MASS: Confirming the Cosmic Infrared Background at 2.2 Microns" . ... The COBE Diffuse Infrared Background Experiment Search for the Cosmic Infrared Background: II. ...

i've been looking so long at these pictures of you that i almost believe that they're real i've been living so long with these pictures of you i almost believe that these pictures are all I can feel remembering you standing quiet in the rain as I ran to your heart to be near and we kissed as the sky fell in holding you close how i always held close in your fear ...

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. ...

... The most spectacular view however is from space, where large areas of aurora can be observed simultaneously, even the entire polar cap. ... Such pictures often show a continuous ring of aurora around the polar cap (picture above), caused mostly by electrons leaking out along magnetic field lines, from the plasma sheet of the Earth's magnetic tail. ... Field lines from the auroral oval are believed to lead to the plasma sheet. ... A near-Earth circular polar orbit has many uses. ...

... The most spectacular view however is from space, where large areas of aurora can be observed simultaneously, even the entire polar cap. ... Such pictures often show a continuous ring of aurora around the polar cap (picture above), caused mostly by electrons leaking out along magnetic field lines, from the plasma sheet of the Earth's magnetic tail. ... Field lines from the auroral oval are believed to lead to the plasma sheet. ... A near-Earth circular polar orbit has many uses. ...

... A faint, dusty rose of the northern sky, emission nebula IC 410 lies about 12,000 light-years away in the constellation Auriga. The cloud of glowing hydrogen gas is over 100 light-years across, sculpted by stellar winds and radiation from embedded open star cluster NGC 1893. ... These "tadpoles" (seen just below center) are regions of denser, cooler gas, and more slowly resist the erosive radiation from the hot stars. ... Copyright (c) Amateur Telescope Makers of Boston, Inc. ...

... Bad Astronomy . ... Bitesize Astronomy . ... The Nine Planets . ... Keep Bad Astronomy close to your heart, and help make me filthy rich. ... The sky can be a crowded place. As the Moon makes its stately orbit around the Earth once a month, there are a lot of objects which it passes along the way. ... It so happens that a handful of bright stars lie near the path on the sky that the Moon takes, and so the Moon does actually pass close to or even in front of stars every now and then. ...

TRANSPORTING THE ROOF UP THE MOUNTAIN: OCTOBER 9, 1999 . This is one file of two. ... The pictures get brighter as we get closer to sunrise and then are easier to see as it gets closer to 8am. ... After the tunnel, in High Rolls, the blocked traffic makes a breakout from the convoy. Downhlll traffic is stopped while the enclosure passes through the tunnel. After blocking traffic in Cloudcroft, the convoy succesfully makes it way onto the Sunspot Hwy. ...

... Meta Index / Home Page / Source Flagging Algorithms Any source either having a raw count-rate >= 80, or with quality flag bit 4 set (mod-8 pattern) is checked for "close" neighbours, which may be flagged. ... Check each source in the vicinity of the bright source . ... Compute the maximum distance for flagging the source from maxRad = max(exclusionradius, min(70.0, 35.0 * countTable(i) // 80.0) ) If the flagging is done by omdetect, the exclusion radius is determined from the algorithm at the end . ...