... Long before humankind evolved, before dinosaurs roamed, and even before our Earth existed, ancient globs of stars condensed and orbited a young Milky Way Galaxy. ... Tracking through the constellation Leo on February 23rd, bright planet Saturn and Comet Lulin were both near opposition -- opposite the Sun in planet Earth's sky. ... It also offered early morning risers a tantalizing view of earthshine, the dark portion of the lunar disk illuminated by sunlight reflected from the Earth. ...

... ESO is building what will be the World's largest optical telescope array, The Very Large Telescope (VLT). The VLT Project organisation is responsible for the design and construction of the Unit Telescopes, including enclosures, optics, adapter-rotators and coating unit. ... Unit Telescopes Overview - This page is outdated, an update is in process. ... Secondary mirror (M2 Unit) - This page is outdated, an update is in process. ... Coating Unit - This page is outdated, an update is in process. ...

... 2000 February 22 . Neighboring Galaxy: The Large Magellanic Cloud . ... Explanation: The brightest galaxy visible from our own Milky Way Galaxy is the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Visible predominantly from Earth's Southern Hemisphere , the LMC is the second closest galaxy , neighbor to the Small Magellanic Cloud , and one of eleven known dwarf galaxies that orbit our Milky Way Galaxy. ... The brightest supernova of modern times, SN1987A , occurred in the LMC . ... About APOD | ...

... Armagh Observatory, College Hill, Armagh BT61 9DG, +44 (0)28 3752 2928 . Armagh Observatory, 11 June 2015: Armagh Observatory reports that the next two weeks will provide an interesting opportunity to observe the brightest planet, Venus, and the largest planet, Jupiter, as they move towards one another in the evening twilight. ... The image shows the sky view towards the West at around 11pm on 20 June 2015. ... Professor Mark E. Bailey, Armagh Observatory, College Hill, Armagh BT61 9DG. ...

... Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2000 February 28 . The Sombrero Galaxy from VLT . ... FORS1 , VLT ANTU , ESO . ... Reasons include the Sombrero 's unusually large and extended central bulge of stars, and dark prominent dust lanes that appear in a disk that we see nearly edge-on. Billions of old stars cause the diffuse glow of the extended central bulge. ... About APOD | ...

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. ...

... Planets . ... Earth Satellites . ... Looking in the direction of the constellation Cygnus the Swan and launched by NASA in 2009 is the Kepler Space Observatory.Many previous missions searching for exoplanets mainly detected large giant planets, like large hot Jupiters (it is easier to detect larger planets).However KeplerтАЩs main objective is to search for much smaller planets located in a habitable zone which is not too close nor too far from their star; planets which may be just like our Earth. ...

The Andromeda Galaxy (M31) . Hot stars burn brightly in this image from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer, showing the ultraviolet side of a familiar face. At approximately 2.5 million light-years away, the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) is our Milky Way's largest galactic neighbor. ... The bands of blue-white making up the galaxy's striking rings are neighborhoods that harbor hot, young, massive stars. ... When observed in visible light, Andromeda s rings look more like spiral arms. ...

You Can Make Stellar Images Brighter . Articles | ... A few months ago I wrote an article titled "You Can’t Make Them Brighter". So why am I now writing that you can make them brighter. ... The image of a focused star is actually a small disk called the Airy disk, named after the 19 th century scientist Sir George Airy. ... For a given aperture, a smaller Airy disk means that the light is focused to a smaller disk and is therefore brighter. ... www.astronomy.net . About Astronomy Net | ...

... The Large Magellanic Cloud is a Dwarf Irregular galaxy in orbit around our own Milky Way. It is a large object, several degrees in size, and easily visible to the unaided eye in Southern Hemisphere skies. The LMC is located in the constellation of Doradus at about 5h30m Right Ascension, -68 degrees Declination, and lies at a distance of roughly 50 kiloparsecs (160,000 light years) from Earth. ...

... Our Sun is part of a huge wheel-shaped collection of stars. ... Astronomers have long suspected it was a very massive black hole, and that every galaxy had such a central mass, created early in the history of the universe. ... However, unless that object happens to be headed directly at the black hole (a relatively small target) it will just swing around and fly away again, like a comet making a pass at the Sun. The velocity acquired in falling towards the black hole also helps it escape. ...

... To be read in conjunction with Section 4.11 of the WFPC2 Instrument Handbook , -Version 4.0. ... 1 The second study found evidence that CTE loss for faint stars has increased with time (Whitmore, 1998). The primary observational consequence of CTE loss is that a point source at the top of the chip appears to be fainter than if observed at the bottom of the chip, due to the loss of electrons as the star is read out down the chip (see Figure 1 ). ... Last updated: 06/16/98 10:38:00 . ...

... 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. ...

... Today this year's largest group of sunspots will cross the Sun's central meridian. ... The next day, the number of spots in the group reached five, and the day after, on June 2nd, it was possible to count thirteen sunspots on solar disk, which had been clear prior to this. ... This year's two most powerful active areas, which passed across the solar disk at the beginning of May, 2009, are set to appear in the Sun's eastern sector in two days, on June 6th. ...

... Telescopes . ... The time requests are accepted in an electronic version with on-line form in Russian or English. ... Unregistered request will be disregarded by the Large Telescopes Programm Committee. In exclusive cases the secreatry of the Committee is entitled to accept an observational time request given permission of the Chairman of the Committee or the director of the SAO RAS. The Program Committee considers generally one time request submitted by the principal applicant. ...

An Ancient Universe: How Astronomers Know the Vast Scale of Cosmic Time . THE ANDROMEDA GALAXY . ... The closest large galaxy to us is called the Andromeda Galaxy, for the constellation in which it is found. It is a large spiral-shaped collection of stars about 2.2 million lightyears from us in other words, light takes 2.2 million years to reach us from this galactic neighbor. The area of the sky covered in this image is more than five times the area of the full moon. ...

B?rbel Koribalski (ATNF) + HIPASS and ZOA teams . The HI properties shown below have been measured with the miriad program mbspect assuming a point source model (FWHM = 15.5 arcmin). About 100 sources, particularly the nearby galaxies, are extended and will be re-measured asap. ... Displayed here are the HI peak fluxes of all sources up to 0.7 Jy/beam (bins are 10 mJy/beam). ... Displayed here are the HI systemic velocities of all sources from -300 to +8000 km/s (bins are 100 km/s). ...

... 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. ...

... IC1396 . IC1396 - The "Elephant Trunk" Nebula . ... There is a bright central star cluster, also designated IC1396, which will interfere with your ability to see the faint nebulosity while visually observing this area with a rich-field telescope. ... 9/12/2006 through 10/21/2006 . ... Ha: 7 hours of 30 minute subs . OIII: 14 hours of 30 minute subs . SII: 9 hours of 30 minute subs ...totalling 30 hours . ... Copyright (c) Amateur Telescope Makers of Boston, Inc. ...

... The remnants of these oldest stars should be observable today as metal-poor stars on tightly bound orbits close to the Galactic centre. The EMBLA survey made use of SkyMapper s unique filter system to hunt through more than 5 million stars in the Galactic bulge, picking out metal-poor candidates to observe using AAOmega/2dF at the AAT. Three years of observations and 14,000 stars later, and we ve found at least 10 stars with [Fe/H] . ...