... Comet Hale-Bopp is living up to its expectations. ... The Great Comet of 1997 is now brighter than the Great Comet of 1996 ever was. ... What happened to Jupiter's Great Red Spot? ... Jupiter's thick atmosphere is striped by wind-driven cloud bands that remain fixed in latitude - dark colored bands are known as belts while light colored bands are zones. ... Both writer/editors of APOD are impressed by how bright Comet Hale-Bopp has become, and how easily visible it is. ... 1995 1996 . ...

... 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....

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... August 23, 1996 . NGC 3293: A Bright Young Open Cluster . ... Explanation: Hot Blue stars shine brightly in this beautiful, recently formed galactic or "open" star cluster. Open cluster NGC 3293 is located in the constellation Carina , lies at a distance of about 8000 light years, and has a particularly high abundance of these young bright stars. ... If true, star formation in this open cluster took at least 15 million years. ... About APOD | ...

Next: Conclusions Up: Compensation for Read-Out Noise Previous: Implementation . ... The star cluster, shown in the left panel of Fig. 1 , consists of a field of unresolved stars at random locations and having randomly selected brightnesses. ... These are replotted in Fig. 8 to facilitate comparisons. ... The low level noise is reduced substantially in Fig. 11 , which is the average of 25 restorations of HST star cluster images, each being the result of performing 500 EM iterations. ...

... Ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) are located in external galaxies, their X-ray luminosities (10 39 - 10 41 erg/s) are thousand times greater than those of brightest black holes in the Galaxy. ULXs may be supercritical accretion disks around black holes of stellar masses (~10 Solar masses) like that in SS433, or they may be a hypothetical intermediate-mass black holes (hundreds - thousands Solar masses) with standard accretion disks. ... 2) The ULX progenitors were ejected from the star clusters. ...

... This gives us another handle on how distant the stars are. ... Stars differ not only in distance, but also in apparent brightness. ... Ranking stars by brightness . ... The brightness of the star decreases as the square of the distance. ... At what distance would a 100-watt light bulb have the same brightness as the brighter stars? ... So if the distance of the 100-watt light bulb was 5 kilometers, the distance of the brighter stars would be 10,000,000,000,000 kilometers, or about a light-year. ...

Among the functions the Cluster Database supplies the tclets are usefull tool for various researches (for example, for identification of radio and of optical sources). ... Three type of object are present on the picture: . ... To place the current object under all other click on left mouse button. To remove the object click on right one. ... You can switch off/on all objects of some type by clicking on the Control window buttons: "Galaxies", "FIRST radio objects" or "NVSS radio objects". ...

... 11 Yellow-Green (78% transmission): Contrasts well with the red and blue characteristics of surface features on Jupiter and Saturn. ... 82A Light Blue (73% transmission): Useful on the Moon, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, this subtle pale blue filter enhances areas of low contrast while avoiding significant reduction of overall image brightness. ... Meade Series 4000 Photo-Visual Color Filters may be ordered individually or in the following sets: . ... Meade Series 4000 Broadband Nebular Filters . ...

... STScI-PF95-18 RELEASE DATE: March 31, 1995 HUBBLE TRACKS JUPITER STORMS NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is following dramatic and rapid changes in Jupiter's turbulent atmosphere that will be critical for targeting observations made by the Galileo space probe when it arrives at the giant planet later this year. This Hubble image provides a detailed look at a unique cluster of three white oval-shaped storms that lie southwest (below and to the left) of Jupiter's Great Red Spot. ...

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. ...

... Values have been scaled arbitrarily. High ratios are shown in blue, corresponding to blue colors, and low ratios are shown in red, corresponding to red colors. ... Noise combined with background subtraction difficulties in the lower left quadrant of the WISP1 data (see Fig. \ref{Fig:wisp_snr_mskd}) make colors in this area very unreliable. ... The values shown here are typically a factor of ~3 less than those calculated for the Schmidt data, shown in Figure \ref{Fig:bj_alpha}. ...

... All previous such superstars have been found along with many companion stars in the centres of crowded star clusters. The star is known as VFTS 682 from the VLT-FLAMES Tarantula Survey catalogue of the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) located at Paranal in Chile by means of the attached FLAMES instrument. ... Although VFTS 682 seems to be alone now it is not very far away from a very rich star cluster known as RMC 136 that contains several similar superstars. ...

... Impact craters and associated concentric rings are about the only features to be found on Callisto. ... It has a bright central region that is 600 kilometers in diameter, and its rings extend to 3000 kilometers in diameter. ... This image shows the heavily cratered surface of Callisto. ... Also visible is a fresh, sharp-rimmed crater some 90 km (56 miles) across named Igaluk (center left third of picture), and a bright zone in the south polar area (bottom of image) which could be an impact scar. ...

ATMoB "Open Cluster Observing Award " Guidelines Purpose: To promote observing among the membership of the Amateur Telescope Makers of Boston through participation in the Open Clusters Observing Awards program. Introduction: This awards program is oriented towards visually observing open clusters above magnitude 9.9. ... It turns out that a very unprejudiced and convenient method to dermine the limiting magnitude is to count the number of visible stars in certain areas on the sky. ...

. Please standby and you will be automatically connected to the new location of the unframed Supernova page. Or, click on the link above. If you have questions or problems, please email me at David Bishop dbishop@vhdl.org . Last modified: Mon Aug 27 12:40:15 EDT 2001

. (artistic credits: J. English and B. Koribalski) . bkoribal @ atnf.csiro.au

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" . ...

... BLUE STRAGGLER STARS are unusually hot and bright stars found in the cores of ancient star clusters known as globulars. ... BACKGROUND (from wikipedia): Blue straggler stars are stars in open or globular clusters that are hotter and bluer than other cluster stars having the same luminosity. ... There is evidence in favor of this view, notably that blue straggler stars appear to be much more common in dense regions of clusters, especially in the cores of globular clusters. ...

Astronotes Armagh Planetarium's Stellar Blog! ... Comets and Asteroids . ... Image credit:ESO/J.Emerson/VISTA. ... However others are less pessimistic and it has even been claimed that the mysterious ?Wow! signal? received in 1977 originated from the direction M55.б  Sadly, this still unexplained pulse of radio energy originated from a location rather to the northwest of M55 so I doubt if the source was this cluster (if indeed the signal was genuinely of extraterrestrial origin). ... Mysterious Wow! ...