... Dust Sculptures in the Rosette Nebula . ... A mere 6,000 light-years distant and sailing through the constellation Vela, star cluster RCW 38 is full of powerful stars. ... Planet Venus traced out this S shape in Earth's sky during 2004. ... Now making its closest approach to planet Earth, the comet will pass near the lovely Pleiades star cluster on January 7th and the double star cluster in Perseus on January 27th as Machholz moves relatively quickly through the evening sky. ... January . ...

... 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 | ...

... M4: The Closest Known Globular Cluster . ... Explanation: M4 is a globular cluster visible in dark skies about one degree west of the bright star Antares in the constellation Scorpius . M4 is perhaps the closest globular cluster at 7000 light years , meaning that we see M4 only as it was 7000 years ago, near the dawn of recorded human history . Although containing hundreds of thousands of stars and spanning over 50 light-years, M4 is one of the smallest and sparsest globular clusters known. ...

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... Comet Tutorial . ... On July 1, 1993 an image was taken with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) that clearly shows at least 15 individual fragments in one image frame of the train. ... This made an accurate orbit (or orbits) difficult to determine; however, after numerous observations of the comet, astronmers determined that the comet had passed within 96,000 kilometers (60,000 miles) of the center of Jupiter or 25,000 kilometers (16,000 miles) from the cloud tops during the July 8, 1992, approach. ...

... Comet Tutorial . ... On July 1, 1993 an image was taken with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) that clearly shows at least 15 individual fragments in one image frame of the train. ... This made an accurate orbit (or orbits) difficult to determine; however, after numerous observations of the comet, astronmers determined that the comet had passed within 96,000 kilometers (60,000 miles) of the center of Jupiter or 25,000 kilometers (16,000 miles) from the cloud tops during the July 8, 1992, approach. ...

Supernova 2009js in NGC 918 . This page is devoted to information on Supernova 2009js in NGC 918 . Basic information on this SN, including the last reported brightness, on this Supernova can be found on the main page . Information on the original web pages for many of these images can be found on the updates and links web pages. Discovered independently by Lick Observatory Supernova Search (USA) and Koichi Itagaki (Japan). ... 2009/10/11.44 . 17.2 . ... Joseph Brimacombe . ...

... 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. ...

... Artist?s conception of the collision of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter, as seen from the Galileo spacecraft. At the time of the first impact, the comet fragments will be much farther apart than shown in this illustration. ... One orbit, computer May 18, 1993 by Syuichi Nakano, showed that the comet passed close to Jupiter in July 1992, and would pass within 45,000 kilometers of the center of Jupiter in July, 1994. ... The fragments of Shoemaker-Levy 9 move around Jupiter. ...

... Orbit | ... Comet Hale-Bopp, designated C/1995 O1 (Hale-Bopp), is named after Alan Hale and Thomas Bopp, two amateur astronomers of Cloudcroft, New Mexico, and Glendale, Arizona, who independently discovered it on the night of 22 July 1995 whilst observing the globular cluster M70, in Sagittarius, which happened to be close on the sky. ... The initial orbit even indicated that Hale-Bopp might pass close to the Earth in 1997. ... Path of Comet Hale-Bopp (from March 1996 to May 1997). ... 1997 . ...