... One of the brightest, M78, is centered in this colorful, wide field view, covering an area north of Orion's belt. ... If you could go far away from the Earth and look around the entire sky -- what would you see? ... For reasons unknown, star V838 Mon's outer surface suddenly greatly expanded with the result that it became the brightest star in the entire Milky Way Galaxy in January 2002. ... Shiny NGC 253 Galaxy, is one of the brightest spiral galaxies visible, and also one of the dustiest. ...

... 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. ...

... Happy Birthday to the Very Large Telescope! To celebrate, the telescope has been used to take this space photograph of a party in space. ... What this picture actually shows is a spectacular cloud of gas and dust that astronomers call a stellar nursery. That s because deep inside this pretty pink cloud, new stars are flaring into life. ... Silhouetted against the glowing pink gas are clouds which look like balloons : even thicker clumps of dust, known as Thackery's globules. ...

The image at left shows the nearby Andromeda galaxy. The rectangular box marks the region probed by NASAтАЩs Hubble Space Telescope (a blend of visible and ultraviolet light). ... The bright area near the center of the image is a grouping of stars nestled around the galaxy's black hole. The blue dots sprinkled throughout the image are ultra-blue stars whose population increases around the crowded hub. The square box shows a close-up view of an area around the core. ...

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. ...

... 2016 March 18 . The W in Cassiopeia . ... Explanation: A familiar, zigzag, W pattern in northern constellation Cassiopeia is traced by five bright stars in this colorful and broad mosaic. ... The yellowish giant star is cooler than the Sun, over 40 times the solar diameter, and so luminous it shines brightly in Earth's night from 230 light-years away. ... Of course, night skygazers in the Alpha Centauri star system would also see the recognizable outline traced by Cassiopeia's bright stars. ...

Astronotes Armagh Planetarium's Stellar Blog! ... Armagh Planetarium . ... Stars . ... Space Flight . ... Monthly Sky Notes . ... NGC 6357's inner star forming region glows with the emission of ionized hydrogen gas. Image credit: ESO/VVV Survey/D. Minniti. ... Located around 8000 light years away in the constellation of Scorpius , NGC 6357 (sometimes called the Lobster Nebula ) is a typical stellar nursery, filled with vast clouds of gas and tendrils of dark dust. ... Subscribe to Astronotes . ...

... High-velocity clouds (HVCs) were discovered by Muller, Oort & Raimond (1963) in the 21-cm line emission of neutral, atomic hydrogen. They are gas clouds which are characterised by high radial velocities incompatible with a participation in the rotation of our Galaxy. ... This suggestion was seized by Braun & Burton (1999) who identified 66 compact high-velocity clouds (CHVCs) with positional and kinematic characteristics being compatible with a distribution across the entire Local Group. ...

... Like the night sky on the Earth, the martian sky hosts a plethora of astronomical phenomena occurring around the clock in a neverending space opera played out for the benefit of robotic and future human observers alike. ... Moons . Mars has two moons, Phobos and Deimos . ... Under the same conditions, Deimos would be as bright as -5, somewhat brighter than the planet Venus appears in Earth's sky. ... The moons are also eclipsed by Mars itself (a situation analogous to lunar eclipses at the Earth). ...

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. ...

... STScI-PRC99-13 HUBBLE CLICKS IMAGES OF IO SWEEPING ACROSS JUPITER While hunting for volcanic plumes on Io, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captured these images of the volatile moon sweeping across the giant face of Jupiter. Only a few weeks before these dramatic images were taken, the orbiting telescope snapped a portrait of one of Io's volcanoes spewing sulfur dioxide "snow." ... Astronomers increased the color contrast and added false colors to the image to make the faint plume visible. ...

... Its perihelion would occur on April 1, 1997, at which point the comet would be only 0.92 astronomical units from the Sun, just within the orbit of Earth. ... Taken in April 1993, the photo showed the comet over 13 astronomical units from the Sun, well beyond the orbit of Saturn. ... Hale, as in Comet Hale-Bopp, has written a book, Everybody's Comet (available through the ASP Catalog) and coordinated an Internet project, "Hale-Bopp: Live in the American Classroom." ... Anatomy of a comet. ...

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! ...

... Spacecraft . 29b. Satellites looking down . ... 29e. Explorers of distant space . ... The Hubble orbiting telescope. ... The Hubble telescope , in low Earth orbit, overcomes such limitations, in the visible range and in part of the UV. ... So fruitful was this observation that a second "deep field" exposure of such length, near the southern pole of the heavens, was recently conducted. ... Some satellites specialize in observing the Sun, such as the Japanese Yohkoh and NASA's SOHO . ...

Finding Himalia, The Fifth Brightest Moon Of Jupiter . Articles | ... Himalia is the only moon other than the Galilean moons of Jupiter that is visible in an amateur size telescope. ... I normally use “The Sky” from Software Bisque for planning my observing sessions and in helping me find objects, but it only has the Galilean moons for Jupiter so I used Red Shift (version 3 at the time) which I also had on my computer. ... www.astronomy.net . ... dbHTML," "AstroGuide," "ASTRONOMY.NET" & "VA.NET" . ...

. True Color Image Gallery: Galactic SNR | Magellanic Cloud SNR . Images show regions used to extract spectra . Regions with red strikes are excluded . Background was subtracted from a region around or close to the SNR. Back to G272.2-03.2 Index . Chandra Supernova Remnant Catalog . Main Page | Galactic SNR | Magellanic Cloud SNR . True Color Image Gallery: Galactic SNR | Magellanic Cloud SNR .

... In principle, two observers on the ground can tell, by comparing the position of the same auroral arc against the background stars. ... The display stretches across Canada; just below it, in the middle of the picture, are the lights of Chicago, next to Lake Michigan. ... The Canadian scientific satellite Isis-2 (1971) carried an auroral imaging camera and discovered the diffuse aurora, a broad ribbon around the auroral oval, too spread-out to be noticed from the ground. ... Auroral Acceleration . ...

... Bad Astronomy . ... Bitesize Astronomy . ... Keep Bad Astronomy close to your heart, and help make me filthy rich. ... When Venus is on the far side of the Sun, we see the entire near side lit by the Sun. ... When it is on the near side of the Sun, it shows a beautiful thin crescent, because it is between us and the Sun and we see the mostly unlit dark half. ... To see this for yourself, draw a circle one centimeter across, then, next to it, draw a circle 6 centimeters across. ... 2008 Phil Plait. ...

Halo around the Moon. Halo arises when the light beams refracted on the high clouds icy chips ina form of a six side prism. As a result we see a small halo circle with a 22°-radius. The big circle is formed by the beams paased through the side edge and the base of prismochips. Its radius is equal to 46° (nearly). The big circle is observed rarely and is shining weaker but it is easier to observe it near the Sun, if comparing with the small halo invisible in the bright Sun light. ...

GALAXIES cenA .tiff 40 Bright Radio Galaxy M31.tiff Nikon Andromeda Galaxy (note HII regions in spiral arms) ngc6744.tiff 40 NGC 6744 a face-on spiral clouds_20d.tiff H'blad The Magellanic Clouds our nearest neighbours Lmc_7.tiff Nikon The Large Magellanic Clouds Lmc_zoom.tiff Nikon Detail of previous image smc_7.tiff Nikon The Small Magellanic Clouds smc-zoom.tiff Nikon Detail of previous image 30dor_40_BVR.tiff 40 The 30 Dor ... B [OIII] Halpha trifid.tiff 40" The Trifid Nebula. ...