... Seen to be in the final stages of a titanic galaxy merger, the pair lies some 300 million light-years distant toward the constellation Cancer. A View from Next Door . ... Located just next door, Alpha Centauri is the closest star system to the Sun. ... What's happening around that star? An unusual spiral structure has been discovered around the Milky Way star R Sculptoris, a red giant star located about 1,500 light years away toward the constellation of the Sculptor (Sculptoris). ...

. Go Here for Hubble Ultra Deep Field . ___________________________________________________________________ The Electronic Universe Project e-mail: nuts@moo.uoregon.edu

Astronotes Armagh Planetarium's Stellar Blog! ... Colin Johnston . ... Our Galaxy . ... To locate it, look along the imaginary line between the two end stars on the leading edge of the PloughтАЩs blade (Merak and Dubhe) and Polaris (the North Star), the galaxy M82 (also known as the Cigar Galaxy) along with its companion M81, lies just off this line about a third of the way between the Plough and Polaris. €а€аAs usual, the supernova is far brighter than its home galaxy, appearing as an extra star. ...

... Tonight's Sky . ... The Magazine . ... Observing . ... The double star 54 Leonis, spiral galaxy NGC 3198, and emission nebula NGC 3199 . ... Astronomy for Kids . ... Observing springtime deep-sky objects with a large telescope . ... Bright planets meet at dusk . ... Astronomy magazine subscribers can read the full article for free. ... Get instant access to subscriber content on Astronomy.com! ... Receive news, sky-event information, observing tips, and more from Astronomy's weekly email newsletter....

... Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2014 November 19 . Bright Spiral Galaxy M81 . ... Explanation: One of the brightest galaxies in planet Earth's sky is similar in size to our Milky Way Galaxy: big, beautiful M81 . ... This superbly detailed view reveals M81's bright yellow nucleus, blue spiral arms, and sweeping cosmic dust lanes with a scale comparable to the Milky Way . ...

... STScI-PRC99-16 RING AROUND A GALAXY Space Telescope Science Institute astronomers are giving the public chances to decide where to aim NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Guided by 8,000 Internet voters, Hubble has already been used to take a close-up, multi-color picture of the most popular object from a list of candidates, the extraordinary "polar-ring" galaxy NGC 4650A. Located about 130 million light-years away, NGC 4650A is one of only 100 known polar-ring galaxies. ...

... HUBBLE UNCOVERS DUST DISK AROUND A MASSIVE BLACK HOLE . Resembling a gigantic hubcap in space, a 3,700 light-year-diameter dust disk encircles a 300 million solar-mass black hole in the center of the elliptical galaxy NGC 7052. ... Because the jets in NGC 7052 are not perpendicular to the disk, it may indicate that the black hole and the dust disk in NGC 7052 do not have a common origin. ... NGC 7052 is located in the constellation of Vulpecula, 191 million light-years from Earth. ...

... Bad Astronomy . ... Bitesize Astronomy . ... Bad Astro Store . ... Slacker Astronomy . ... Keep Bad Astronomy close to your heart, and help make me filthy rich. ... Life Under the Moon . ... Seeing Jupiter's Moons . ... Time Zones and the Spherical Earth . A Companion to the Earth? ... December 19, 1999) . ... Big Moon, Little Moon . ... How Big is the Moon? ... 14, 2000) . ... 2008 Phil Plait. ... Subscribe to the Bad Astronomy Newsletter! Talk about Bad Astronomy on the BA Bulletin Board! ...

... Our recent observations with the Hubble Space Telescope (August 29, 2014) led to revealing a highly isolated dwarf spheroidal galaxy KKs 3 situated at a distance of 2.12 0.07 Mpc from the Milky Way. The dSph galaxy locates on the southern sky (RA=02 h 24 m 44.4 s , Dec.= ... Over the last decade, about 30 dSph galaxies have been discovered inside the Local Group through systematic search in the vicinity of M31 and more that a dozen dSphs were discovered in the nearby group around M81. ...

... Well, there are at least a million times more galaxies in the Universe than there are human beings! ... These newcomers are bigger and brighter than anything else in space, and if that wasn't interesting enough, they also glow bright green! This has led astronomers to name them 'green bean' galaxies (look at the little green bean-like spot in the middle of this space picture). ... We think that they shine so brilliantly because of a black hole at their centre. ...

An image of the grand design of spiral galaxy M100 obtained with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope resolves individual stars within the majestic spiral arms. ... Hubble has the ability to resolve individual stars in other galaxies and measure accurately the light from very faint stars. This makes space telescope invaluable for identifying a rare class of pulsating stars, called Cepheid Variable stars embedded within M100's spiral arms. ... 617) 495-7062 . Fax: (617) 495-7356 . ...

... Solar Data: f.e. X-ray . Night Sky Live . ... Heavens-Above: Sky chart, Satellites, Iridiums and astronomical objects For Moscow For SAO Baksan . ... ESO-MIDAS page . ... Tutorials for Astronomy . ... Asteroid and Comet Hazard . ... Observable Comets: This page lists links to orbital elements and ephemerides of (potentially) observable comets. ... Leonid page - a lot of information for years Comets and Meteor Showers . The American Meteor Society . ... North American Meteor Network Home Page . ...

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 . ...

... ROTATION CURVE: When studying spiral galaxies it is invariably found that the stellar rotational velocity in the disk remains constant, or "flat", with increasing distance away from the galactic center. ... The rotation speed of the stars in galaxies is found NOT to decrease with increasing distance from the galactic center (see emission lines in the spectrum), implying that the overall mass distribution of the galaxy is different from the light distribution. ...

... Another feature of the Human Orrery is its outer metal ring, which lies along the outside edge of the red path marked on the diagram below (the scale is in metres). ... Located in the Constellation: Pisces . Description: The Gravitational lens in question is the Galaxy Cluster 0024+1654 (5 billion light years away). ... Description: Hamal (or alpha Arietis) is the brightest star in the constellation Aries (apparent magnitude of 2.0). This K-Type star is located 65.9 light years away. ...

QSO ABSORPTION LINE STUDIES with the HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE COLORADO GROUP: JOHN STOCKE , MIKE SHULL, JAMES GREEN, STEVE PENTON, CHARLES DANFORTH, BRIAN KEENEY Results thus far based on: 300 QSO ABSORBERS found by HST Spectrographs at z 0.1 and at low column densities (NH I = 1012.5--16.5 cm-2 ) AND 1.35 Million galaxy locations and redshifts from the CfA ... 2007, ApJ, 671, 146) At least 55% of all Ly absorbers with NH I > 1013 cm-2 are METAL-BEARING at ~ 10% SOLAR. ...

... Local Group velocity in km/s: where l is the Galactic longitude and b the Galactic latitude, and v sys is the systemic velocity in km/s. Distance in Mpc : We adopt the following distances for galaxies with small Local Group velocities (v LG NGC6822 0.490 Mpc ( Mateo 1998 ) DDO210 0.880 Mpc ( Mateo 1998 ) NGC0055 1.480 Mpc ( Mateo 1998 ) NGC0300 2.04 Mpc (Willick Batra 2001) ESO594-G004 1.060 Mpc ( Mateo ... absolute blue magnitude: with D in Mpc. ...

... Astronomy news . ... NASA's Spitzer Images Out-of-This-World Galaxy . ... It is spiral-shaped like our Milky Way, with long, spindly arms of stars. The "eye" at the center of the galaxy is actually a monstrous black hole surrounded by a ring of stars. In this color-coded infrared view from Spitzer, the area around the invisible black hole is blue and the ring of stars, white. ... The ring around the black hole is bursting with new star formation. ...

... Welcome to the Boneyard. ... AA17666-11 sites several supernova mistakes from this period. 1998di (= KL Dra), IAUC 6982 discovered 1998/08/02 by Mike Schwartz . Found in MCG +10-27-12 NED01 at R.A. = 19h24m38s.19, Decl. ... Located 0".6 east and 3".8 north of the nucleus of MCG +10-27-12 NED01 ( Discovery image ( local mirror )) ( VSnet 98di web page ) . Mag 16.8, Type CV NOTE: This has now been confirmed to be not a supernova, but a cataclysmic variable (dwarf nova) of the CR Boo class. ...

... ftp://www.kusastro.kyoto-u.ac.jp/pub/cgmw/ : This catalog, giving about 7000 galaxies behind the Milky Way between l = 210 degrees and 250 degrees, represents a systematic search for galaxies by means of 32 film copies of the UK Schmidt Southern Infrared Atlas on the Milky Way covering about 900 square degrees. ... Japan, Vol. ... This will be distributed upon request from Astronomical Data Analysis Center of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and other astronomical data centers. ...