... Inside the Eagle Nebula . ... A closer look of the Eagle Nebula, however, shows the bright region is actually a window into the center of a larger dark shell of dust. ... Annular Eclipse: The Ring of Fire . ... A photogenic group of nebulae can be found toward Chamaeleon, a constellation visible predominantly in skies south of the Earth's equator. ... A Fleeting Eclipse . ... Galaxy NGC 4388 Expels Huge Gas Cloud . ... NGC 4388 has a bright energetic nucleus and so is classified as an active galaxy....

... Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2007 June 20 . A Daylight Eclipse of Venus . ... Just two days ago, two of the three celestial objects easily visible during the day appeared to collide. ... Moments after this image was taken, the Moon, visible as the crescent on the right of the above image , eclipsed Venus , appearing near half phase on the lower left. ... 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. ...

... Armagh Observatory, College Hill, Armagh BT61 9DG, +44 (0)28 3752 2928 . See also images taken on November 22nd . Image taken by Andy McCrea who says, . To me the comet appears yellowish and it has gone from star-like to a . ... More images from Andy McCrea here . ... The true explanation is that a very faint comet, known as periodic comet Holmes, produced a massive outburst of material and became a million times brighter than it was just a day earlier. ... More images from Andy McCrea . ...

... 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....

The Sun's corona . ... For instance, short "plumes" rising from the polar regions of the Sun look very much like field lines coming out of the end of a bar magnet, and they therefore suggest that the Sun, in addition to the intense fields of sunspots, also has a global magnetic field like the Earth's. Arches above the . Sun's surface . ... It is brightest near sunspots, whose arched field lines apparently hamper the outflow of solar wind which carries away energy and helps cool the corona. ...

... On the morning of Thursday, 26 February, amid the Gal pagos Islands, the Sun will fade from view. Not the culmination of ancient prophecy, but none less mystical, Earth's small Moon will be executing a slow slide past the enormous Sun. ... And anyone living in southern North America, Central America, northern South America, or on islands and cruise ships in the Caribbean Sea will, weather permitting, have the opportunity to experience the wonder of a solar eclipse. ...

... STScI-PRC98-18 AN INFRARED VIEW OF SATURN In honor of NASA Hubble Space Telescope's eighth anniversary, we have gift wrapped Saturn in vivid colors. ... This view provides detailed information on the clouds and hazes in Saturn's atmosphere. ... The green and yellow colors indicate a haze above the main cloud layer. ... Red clouds are even higher than orange clouds. ... This Saturn image was taken at longer infrared wavelengths of 1.0, 1.8, and 2.1 micrometers, displayed as blue, green, and red. ...

... 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) ...

... V838 Mon is a member of a new class of eruptive variables which appear as a peculiar novae having late K-M type spectra in their outburst. Before its outburst, it was a wide binary system of B3V type stars. ... The B3V companion was seen in the outburst in the UV spectrum taken with HST (Rauch et al., ... In the latest spectra, the light of B3V companion was predominating in the short-wave photometric bands. ... CCD blue frames of V838 Mon before the eclipse (left) and in the eclipse (right). ...

... Survey Telescopes . ... Images . ... A new infrared image from ESOтАЩs VISTA survey telescope reveals an extraordinary landscape of glowing tendrils of gas, dark clouds and young stars within the constellation of Monoceros (the Unicorn). ... With its huge field of view, large mirror and sensitive camera, VISTA is ideal for obtaining deep, high quality infrared images of large areas of the sky, such as the Monoceros R2 region. ... Extracts from the VISTA image of the Monoceros R2 star forming region ...

EMBARGOED UNTIL: 9:20 AM CST, January 6, 1999 CONTACT: John Biretta Space Telecsope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD (Phone: (410) 338-4917; Internet: biretta@stsci.edu) HUBBLE DETECTS FASTER-THAN-LIGHT MOTION IN GALAXY M87 Astronomers reported today discovering clouds which appear to move many times faster than the speed of light, shooting out from the region of a black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy. ... It's an illusion created by the finite speed of light and rapid motion," Biretta said. ...

Astronotes Armagh Planetarium's Stellar Blog! ... Moon . ... Stars . ... Space Flight . ... Monthly Sky Notes . ... June . ... NASA has been studying NCLтАЩs for some time and are trying to determine if there is a relationship between climate change and these wonders of the night sky. ... Spica and Saturn actually form a triangle with the bright orangish star Arcturus which is higher in the sky. ... The ancient Greeks saw the stars of Libra as part of Scorpius, specifically the scorpionтАЩs claws. ...

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. ...

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 . ...

Seven months ago, on Mar 19, 2008, at 09:12 Moscow time, a new star appeared on the sky. The Sun had already risen over the Russia, but people of the Western hemisphere might be able to see by their eyes a faint starlet near one of Bootes constellation stars. This starlet appeared and faded by an order of magnitude in a minute. Astronomers named it GRB080319B or, informally, the Naked-Eye Burst, as it was twice as bright as human eye can see a star. ... Royal Astronomical Society . ...

... Solar Wind . ... During a total eclipse of the Sun, when for a few minutes the Moon completely covers the Sun's face, a glow appears around the darkened Sun--the solar corona, the Sun's outermost atmosphere. ... Such high levels of ionization require the atoms to be buffeted around by extremely high temperatures, around 1,000,000 C (1,800,000 F). ... It is brightest near sunspots, whose arched field lines apparently hamper the outflow of solar wind which carries away energy and helps cool the corona...

You Can Make Stellar Images Brighter . Articles | ... A few months ago I wrote an article titled "You Can’t Make Them Brighter". So why am I now writing that you can make them brighter. ... The image of a focused star is actually a small disk called the Airy disk, named after the 19 th century scientist Sir George Airy. ... For a given aperture, a smaller Airy disk means that the light is focused to a smaller disk and is therefore brighter. ... www.astronomy.net . About Astronomy Net | ...

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! ...

Having studied the solar corona and its radio emissions sunspot cycles ago, I was keen to verify its existence optically during the total solar eclipse of Wednesday, 4 December 2002, the first on Australian soil since 1976. The moon's shadow was to travel from the south-Atlantic west of The Congo, across southern Africa, the Indian Ocean and into the Great Australian Bight, finally making Australian landfall at Ceduna, South Australia (SA). ... The favoured site to observe the eclipse was Ceduna. ...