... Comet Ikeya-Zhang has become bright enough to stand out in the night sky. ... The comet appears.. ... Known to some as the Elephant's Trunk Nebula, parts of gas and dust clouds of this star formation region may appear to take on foreboding forms, some nearly human. ... This image from the Hubble Space Telescope reveals the Cat's Eye Nebula to be one of the most complex planetary nebulae known. ... In the heart of the Rosette Nebula lies a bright open cluster of stars that lights up the nebula. ...

... 2001 February 7 . Distant Open Cluster M103 . ... Explanation: Bright blue stars highlight the open cluster known as M103 . The gas clouds from which these stars condensed has long dispersed. ... In fact, a formerly blue star has recently evolved off the main sequence and is visible above as the red giant star near the cluster center. In general, yellow stars like our Sun are usually less bright and hence less prominent in open clusters than their massive blue cousins. ... 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. ...

... 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. ...

... These Frontier Fields will combine the power of HST with the natural gravitational telescopes of high-magnification clusters of galaxies. ... We are soliciting gravitational lensing maps for the last four Hubble Frontier Fields clusters (MACSJ0717.5+3745, MACSJ1149.5+2223, AbellS1063, and Abell 370) based upon the exceptionally deep HST FF imaging and other new ancillary data. ... For the full set of proposal instructions and requirements, see the FY16 Frontier Fields Lensing Map Call for Proposals....

COLOR PRINT OF NGC 4881 AND PART OF THE SURROUNDING FIELD This photo mosaic, which shows a field of distant galaxies, is a computer enhanced reproduction of a picture taken 4 March 1994 with the repaired Hubble Space Telescope. ... It is a 13th-magnitude elliptical galaxy in the outskirts of the Coma Cluster, a great cluster of galaxies more than 5 times farther away than the Virgo Cluster. ... We must find that peak ("turnover") in NGC 4881 in order to judge the distance. ...

In autumn 1994, two groups of astronomers announced that they had discovered Cepheid variable stars in a distant cluster of galaxies. ... As the term suggests, variable stars change in brightness over time. ... Variable stars are an ideal way to get high-school students doing real science, with real data, from the real sky. ... a sky chart to find the stars . ... Students can use the nearby stars to estimate the magnitude of Delta. ... Locate the star Delta in Cepheus and estimate its brightness . ...

This is a copy of a Press Release from E.S.O. Eight years after the passage of Comet Halley in early 1986, astronomers at the European Southern Observatory have succeeded in obtaining an image of this famous object at a distance of no less than 2,820 million km from the Sun. ... The image shows the 6 x 15 km avocado-shaped nucleus as an extremely faint point of light without any surrounding dust cloud. ... This observation was made with the ESO 3.58 metre New Technology Telescope (NTT). ...

... 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) ...

True Color Image Gallery: Galactic SNR | Magellanic Cloud SNR . ... Chandra Proposer's Guide pile up section ] During frame readout, the ACIS CCDs take 40 microsec to (parallel) transfer the charge by one pixel. As a result of this, each frame readout, each pixel is exposed for 40 microsec to a source (plus cosmic X-ray background) at each location along its column. ... Note also that the image does not just trail, it extends along the whole column. ... Chandra Supernova Remnant Catalog . ...

... 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. ...

... ISC Kosmotras . ... Comments, Opinions Publications Dnepr Program . Dnepr launch record 17 August 2011. ... Baikonur Cosmodrome Yasny launch base Downloads . ... Over the years of its successful business operations , ISC Kosmotras has performed 22 Dnepr orbital flights with a total of 128 payloads inserted into their orbits. ... Below is the list of payloads lofted into their target orbits on Dnepr launch missions put together by ISC Kosmotras: . ... MEGSAT-1 (Italy) . ... LATINSAT-A, -B (USA) . ...

ATMoB "Open Cluster Observing Award " Guidelines Purpose: To promote observing among the membership of the Amateur Telescope Makers of Boston through participation in the Open Clusters Observing Awards program. Introduction: This awards program is oriented towards visually observing open clusters above magnitude 9.9. ... It turns out that a very unprejudiced and convenient method to dermine the limiting magnitude is to count the number of visible stars in certain areas on the sky. ...

The artist's concept depicts Kepler-186f , the first validated Earth-sized planet to orbit a distant star in the habitable zone. The size of Kepler-186f is known to be less than ten percent larger than Earth, but its mass, density and composition are not known. ... Prior to this discovery, the "record holder" for the most "Earth-like" planet went to Kepler-62f, which is 40 percent larger than the size of Earth and orbits in its star's habitable zone. ...

... 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. ...

... Comet Ikeya-Zhang, designated C/2002 C1 (Ikeya-Zhang), is named after Kaoru Ikeya of Shizuoka prefecture, Japan, and Daqing Zhang of Henan province, China, who independently discovered it on the night of 1 February 2002. A preliminary orbit reported the following day indicated that it would come moderately close to both the Earth and the Sun and that it might become visible to the naked eye during late March and April 2002. ... Bailey, M.E., Clube, S.V.M. and Napier, W.M. The Origin of Comets . ...

... 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. ...

Next: Format files Up: Star tables Previous: Star tables . ... If so, simply copy out the data for your program stars as fixed-format ASCII records, one star per record. ... It will first ask for the name you want to give your new program-star table. ... It is important to make sure the star names in your source files match those in your data files. ... That means using short, unique names in your program-star files, to match those that will appear in the data. ...

... One of this year's largest mass ejections from the Sun's atmosphere was recorded last Sunday by TESIS telescopes aboard the CORONAS-PHOTON satellite ( video - wmv 4.3 MB ). ... Over the course of a week, two gigantic solar prominences were simultaneously ejected from the surface of the Sun. ... Earth will not feel the Sun's influence either. ... The TESIS observatory ї TESIS: www.tesis.lebedev.ru . ... One of this year's largest mass ejections from the Sun's atmosphere (movie WMV, 4.3 MB) . ...

1950: Jan 30--Feb 3: Lows were 0,-3,5,-2,-3 . 1962: Jan 20--23: Lows were 12,13,6,8 . 1962: Feb 24--27: Lows were 25,23,18,19 . 1974: Jan 7--9: Lows were 11,12,10 . 1989: Feb 4--8: Lows were 7,4,8,7,8 . Record cold for January: -4 on January 27, 1957 . Record cold for February: -3 on February 3, 1950 . 1935: Jan 24--26: Highs were 65,64,64 . 1968: Feb 27-29: Highs were 68,68,71 . 1969: Jan 4--6: Highs were 63,62,62 . ... To the Weather Page . ...