... Yes, but how many dark clouds have a multicolored lining? Pictured, behind this darker cloud, is a pileus iridescent cloud, a group of water droplets that have a uniformly similar size and so together diffract different colors of sunlight by different amounts. ... TrES 2b: Dark Planet . ... Planet TrES-2b reflects back less than one percent of the light it receives, making it darker than any known planet or moon, darker even than coal. ... The Fairy of Eagle Nebula . ... June 2012 . ... June . ...

... Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2010 September 19 . Dark Clouds of the Carina Nebula . ... These ominous figures are actually molecular clouds , knots of molecular gas and dust so thick they have become opaque . ... Pictured above is part of the most detailed image of the Carina Nebula ever taken, a part where dark molecular clouds are particularly prominent. ... About APOD | ...

Discover the cosmos! ... 2000 December 29 . The Dark Horsehead Nebula . ... Image Processed by Al Kelly . Explanation: While drifting through the cosmos this magnificent interstellar dust cloud, sculpted by stellar winds and radiation, has chanced to assume a recognizable shape. Fittingly named The Horsehead Nebula it is embedded in the immense complex of star forming gas and dust surrounding the Orion Nebula some 1,500 light-years distant. ... About APOD | ...

Neptune . ... Triton . Neptune 291k gif . Full Disk Neptune 93k gif ; 29k jpg . ... New Dark spot 25k jpg ; 113k gif ; caption ; press release . ... Another thin Crescent of Neptune 166k gif . ... low resolution shot of Neptune, possibly showing great black spot 210k gif . ... Parting view of Neptune and moon Triton 59k gif ; 17k gif ; 23k jpg . ... Small Dark Spot 190k gif ; 133k jpg . Small Dark Spot 55k gif ; 23k jpg . ... The Great Dark Spot 423k gif ; 153k gif ; 97k jpg . ...

Most of these images were obtained by Mike Bessell, Michelle Buxton, Hwankyung Sung, Ralph Sutherland and Bob Watson at SSO using a 2Kx2K Site CCD behind a Nikon or Hasselblad lens or directly on the 1m telescope. A few images are from the Hubble Space Telescope. Some of the M42 images were obtained with the KPNO 1m and ESO NTT telescope. One image is a mosaic of IRAS images. ... Details of the CCD imaging program at MSSSO. ... antenna.jpg (53KB) . ... ngc6744.jpg (59KB) . ...

... This photograph shows a little-known cloud of cosmic gas and dust (known as a nebula) called Gum 15. This picture was snapped using a large telescope based in one of the most extreme environments on Earth; a very dry and very remote region of Chile called the Atacama Desert. ... Although all that makes the Atacama Desert sound uninviting it is the ideal location for a telescope. ... The higher a telescope is based, the less atmosphere it has to look through to see the stars. ...

Making HST Pictures: Examples and Illustrations . ... These illustrations represent some of the steps and techniques used to produce “pretty pictures” from HST images. ... TIFFs (ftp) . ... Separate images are exposed through different color filters. ... An alternate way to make color images . ... Eight bit (one byte) images contain 256 different values that may be represented by 256 shades of gray or 256 arbitrary colors from a color map (or palette) of all possible colors. ...

... The double star 54 Leonis, spiral galaxy NGC 3198, and emission nebula NGC 3199 . ... Two very different gas clouds in the galaxy next door . This sharp image reveals two distinctive glowing clouds of gas red-hued NGC 2014 and its blue neighbor NGC 2020 in the Large Magellanic Cloud. ... The strikingly different colors of NGC 2014 and NGC 2020 are the result of both the different chemical makeup of the surrounding gas and the temperatures of the stars that are causing the clouds to glow. ...

... Dark matter spanning the simulated universe . by Alan Duffy (Swinburne University of Technology) . The Dark Matter in a simulation 600 million lightyears across. The Dark Matter forms filaments spanning the Universe, known as the Cosmic Web. Galaxies form in the intersection of these filaments, seen as spherical clumps or haloes. ... Credits: Paul Bourke (University of Western Australia) and Alan Duffy (Swinburne University of Technology) . ... today * ATNF | ...

Astronotes Armagh Planetarium's Stellar Blog! ... Our Galaxy . Milky Way . Stars . ... Other Galaxies . ... Barred spiral galaxy NGC 6744 is located in a constellation of the southern hemisphereтАЩs sky, called Pavo (Latin for peacock). At a distance from our Solar System of about 30 million light years, NGC 6744 is not only one of the closest spiral galaxies but is thought to be one of the visible galaxies most like our own Milky Way. Is it our cosmic doppelganger? ...

... self-absorption - the absorption of light shining on an object by a process similar to that which produced the light originally; if a cloud emits less light than it absorbs from other clouds behind it, this net loss of light, termed self-absorption , causes the foreground cloud to appear darker than the background field (the term is from spectroscopy, where small absorption dips sometimes occur in larger emission lines, making the latter look as if it is absorbing part of itself) . ... HISA Main ...

Images and text 2003 Paul Valleli . While up at Stellafane for pre-convention preparations, I spent some early morning times, experimenting with different videography setups on the 13" F/10 Schupmann at the McGregor Observatory. ... Mars was too bright and would have required neutral density filters. ... Next time, I will try 12mm and 9mm projections. ... I aquired about ten thousand frames by 3AM, at which time a breeze picked up and the seeing went to Hellas! ... 2003 Paul Valleli . ...