... Just one minute before midnight EDT, Friday, August 28, the Space Shuttle Discovery began a long arc into a cloudy sky. ... Shadows of Saturn at Equinox . ... Unusual shadows and dark rings appeared around Saturn near its equinox last month. At that time -- early August -- Saturn's ring plane pointed directly at the Sun. ... Many stars like our Sun were formed in open clusters. ... D. rad Bacteria: Candidate Astronauts . ... Known as an extremophile, bacteria such as D. NGC 7771 Galaxy Group . ...

... August 23, 1996 . NGC 3293: A Bright Young Open Cluster . ... Explanation: Hot Blue stars shine brightly in this beautiful, recently formed galactic or "open" star cluster. Open cluster NGC 3293 is located in the constellation Carina , lies at a distance of about 8000 light years, and has a particularly high abundance of these young bright stars. ... If true, star formation in this open cluster took at least 15 million years. ... About APOD | ...

... 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. ...

... STScI-PRC00-25 A DYING STAR IN GLOBULAR CLUSTER M15 The globular cluster Messier 15 is shown in this color image obtained with the NASA Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2). ... Known as Kuestner 648, this was the first planetary nebula to be identified in a globular cluster. ... At the present time, the most massive stars remaining in M15 have about 80 percent of the mass of our Sun, a fact that makes the existence of a planetary nebula like K 648 something of a mystery. ...

An eight-billion-year-old cluster of stars 13,000 light-years from Earth, called NGC 6791, can be seen in the image. ... This particular cluster is called an open cluster, because the stars are loosely bound and have started to spread out from each other. The area pictured is 0.2 percent of Kepler's full field of view, and shows hundreds of stars in the constellation Lyra. The image has been color-coded so that brighter stars appear white, and fainter stars, red. ...

Why areNuclear Star Clusters interesting? 1) Many -- if not all ­ nuclear star clusters appear to be young, or at least have a young population of stars. ... 3) If nuclear clusters indeed form in the galaxy center, their impact on the dynamics of stars and gas in the central region of the host galaxy needs to be understood, because it can potentially influence the galaxy morphology. For example, it has been suggested that nuclear clusters can destroy stellar bars and thus form galaxy bulges. ...

Astronotes Armagh Planetarium's Stellar Blog! ... Our Galaxy . ... Stars . ... Space Flight . ... A galaxy is born: This artist's impression shows a young galaxy, about two billion years after the Big Bang, accreting material from the surrounding hydrogen and helium gas and forming many young stars. ... Galaxies, distant from us in space and time, have been in the news recently. ... Astronomers at the European Southern Observatory have observed another process which helped primordial galaxies grow. ...

... The Pleiades star cluster, also known as the Seven Sisters and Messier 45, is a conspicuous object in the night sky with a prominent place in ancient mythology . ... The stars in the Pleiades are thought to have formed together around 100 million years ago, making them 1/50th the age of our sun, and they lie some 130 parsecs (425 light years ) away. ... Data for these stars are listed in a table below. ... Yes . ... WEBDA Pleiades cluster data . ... M45: The Pleiades Star Cluster (2007 November 18) ...

National Aeronautics and Space Administration . ... JOHN E. BLAHA (COLONEL, USAF, RET.) NASA ASTRONAUT (FORMER) . ... EDUCATION: Graduated from Granby High School in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1960; received a bachelor of science in engineering science from the United States Air Force Academy in 1965 and a master of science in astronautical engineering from Purdue University in 1966. ... NASA EXPERIENCE: Selected as an astronaut in May 1980, Blaha has logged 161 days in space on 5 space missions. ...

... Science User Portal . ... ESO, the European Southern Observatory . ... Travel and Contacts . Travel to ESO Headquarters . ... Survey Telescopes . ... Star Clusters . ... FLAMES . ... 100 Hours of Astronomy . ... IMAX€о 3D Film Hidden Universe . ... This image, the first to be released publicly from VISTA, the worldтАЩs largest survey telescope, shows the spectacular star-forming region known as the Flame Nebula, or NGC 2024, in the constellation of Orion (the Hunter) and its surroundings. ...

Stellar Clusters are very useful laboratories for empirically studying stellar evolution. ... All cluster stars are at the same distance . All cluster stars have the same physical age . ... CM diagram Young Cluster In this case we see the Main Sequence fully represented. The blue dots represent massive stars with short main sequence lifetimes. ... Thus, identifying the most massive star which is still on the main sequence is an effective means of determining the age of a stellar cluster. ...

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. ...

... now - return the registration form . May 10 - deadline for conference registration and accommodation form . ... July 1 - final information to participants . ... RETURN] . ... Please send the abstracts to LOC. E-mail address: astro@te.net.ua . ... All participants are requested to fill in the enclosed Registration Form and send it to us before May 10, 1999 (via electronic mail to astro@te.net.ua ) . ... Please complete and return this form (even if you sent the pre-registration form) . ...

... The bright supernova (hereafter SN) in the galaxy NGC 4527 was first sighted by S. Knight (USA) on April 13.17UT at magnitude ~14.0v. The report of the sighting was subsequently forwarded by phone to the AAVSO. ... SN 1991T. The galaxy NGC 4527 is an Sb(s)II type galaxy with an apparent Blue magnitude of 11.32 (Shapley-Ames, 1981). ... An analysis of this event utilizing visual observations by amateurs, plus a light curve is presented.. ... THE LIGHT CURVE: . ... ISN SN 1991T web page . ...

... The awsome spectacle of a brilliant comet, with its long ghostly tail streaming behind it, is a rare event. ... Only one other comet, Comet Halley, was seen so far from the Sun, giving scientists an opportunity to watch it as it slowly warmed up and sprouted a tail. ... Comets are the Rip Van Winkles of the solar system -- mini-worlds that have changed little during their 4.5-billion-year nap far from the Sun. ... Observing Comets . ... Once, comets inhabited the entire solar system. ...

Results from 6m telescope observations of globular clusters in dwarf galaxies Sharina M. We consider properties of globular clusters in dwarf galaxies observed with the multi-slit unit of the SCORPIO spectrograph at the SAO 6m telescope. ... Studying GCs in dwarf galaxies at the faintest end of the galaxy luminosity function provides valuable information for a better understanding of galaxy evolution and evolutionary connection between globular clusters and nuclei of galaxies. ...

Armagh Observatory, 11 August 2000: . ... The International Workshop will celebrate the 400th anniversary of the discovery of the star "P Cygni" by the Dutch mathematician and cartographer Willem Jansz Blaeu on 18 August 1600. ... The anniversary conference has been organised by Dr Mart de Groot , a world expert in hot, luminous stars, whose studies of P Cygni over 35 years have contributed significantly to our present knowledge about the star. ... P Cygni 2000 Workshop . ...

... Future seminars . P a s t seminars . Seminar council . Stability of cold fronts in clusters of galaxies " . E. Churazov (IKI, MPA) . ... One of the insteresting results of Chandra and XMM-Newton observatories is the discovery of sharp structures in the X-ray surface brightness of galaxy clusters. These structures (a.k.a. cold fronts) are likely associated with the contacted discontinuities formed when a hot gas flows over a colder gravitationally bound gas cloud. ...

... Dept. for Physics of Stars&Galaxies . ... Using a database view Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), containing almost a million spectra created 15,000 sample galaxies with active star formation, which is used for various studies and physical state of evolution of galaxies. ... Star clusters of the Galaxy . The project MWSC (Milky Way Star Clusters) directory using 2MASS, which includes nearly 500 million vision to the limit Ks = 15.3, analyzed more than 4,000 cluster-like objects in the galaxy. ...

... BLUE STRAGGLER STARS are unusually hot and bright stars found in the cores of ancient star clusters known as globulars. ... BACKGROUND (from wikipedia): Blue straggler stars are stars in open or globular clusters that are hotter and bluer than other cluster stars having the same luminosity. ... There is evidence in favor of this view, notably that blue straggler stars appear to be much more common in dense regions of clusters, especially in the cores of globular clusters. ...