... The above pictured open cluster, M11, contains thousands of stars and is just over five thousand light years distant. ... Pictured above are two of the most prominent reflection nebulas -- dust clouds lit by the reflecting light of bright-embedded stars. ... Stars and the Bubble Nebula . ... In this wide-angle view, the Bubble nebula lies at the center of a larger complex of shocked glowing gas about 11,000 light-years distant in the fair constellation Cassiopeia. ... 192: The Wrong Galaxy . ...

... 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. ...

Astronotes Armagh Planetarium's Stellar Blog! ... Stars . ... Space Flight . ... Tides of light: M8 in spectacular detail (Image credit: NASA/ESA) . ... Spectacular! ... What else can I say about this stunning Turneresque image of the Lagoon Nebula (M8)? ... This is of course illusory.€а This is a false colour image: light from glowing hydrogen is shown as red, light from ionised nitrogen appears as green and light which passed through a yellow filter is coloured blue. ... Astronotes . ...

... STScI-PRC95-45a CRUCIBLE OF CREATION: PANORAMIC HUBBLE MOSAIC ZOOMS IN ON MAELSTROM OF STAR BIRTH This spectacular color panorama of the center the Orion nebula is one of the largest pictures ever assembled from individual images taken with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. ... Though this 2.5 light-years wide view is still a small portion of the entire nebula, it includes almost all of the light from the bright glowing clouds of gas and a star cluster associated with the nebula. ...

... August 28, 1996 . NGC 5882: A Small Planetary Nebula . ... Pictured above is the planetary nebula NGC 5882, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope . Although planetary nebulae can appear similar to planets like Uranus and Neptune , they are actually gas clouds surrounding stars typically hundreds of light years away. Planetary nebula form when a typical star completes fusion in its core and ejects an outer envelope of gas - usually about 10 percent of the star's initial mass. ...

... STScI-PRC00-25 A DYING STAR IN GLOBULAR CLUSTER M15 The globular cluster Messier 15 is shown in this color image obtained with the NASA Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2). ... Known as Kuestner 648, this was the first planetary nebula to be identified in a globular cluster. ... At the present time, the most massive stars remaining in M15 have about 80 percent of the mass of our Sun, a fact that makes the existence of a planetary nebula like K 648 something of a mystery. ...

... Armagh Observatory, College Hill, Armagh BT61 9DG, +44 (0)28 3752 2928 . ... Aurora . ... Corona . Fireballs . ... Zodiacal Light . ... The first thing to do is get acquainted with what the night sky looks like. ... The National Schools Observatory web site has very good horizon views of the sky for the current night. ... If the object is moving slowly across the sky then it may be one of the larger satellites. ... Cloudbait Observatory - October 2002 . ... October 2003 Aurora at Armagh . ...

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. ...

... The awsome spectacle of a brilliant comet, with its long ghostly tail streaming behind it, is a rare event. ... Only one other comet, Comet Halley, was seen so far from the Sun, giving scientists an opportunity to watch it as it slowly warmed up and sprouted a tail. ... Comets are the Rip Van Winkles of the solar system -- mini-worlds that have changed little during their 4.5-billion-year nap far from the Sun. ... Observing Comets . ... Once, comets inhabited the entire solar system. ...

Class 1 Introduction, Background History of Modern Astronomy The Night Sky, Eclipses and the Seasons Kepler's Laws Newtonian Gravity General Relativity Matter and Light Telescopes Class 2 Solar System Characteristics Formation Exosolar Planets Class 3 Stars The Sun Stellar Evolution of Low and High Mass Stars Deaths of Stars Exotic Stars Class 4 Galaxies Galaxy Classification Formation of Galaxies Galactic Evolution ... So far, one planet has been studied by this method. ...

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 | ...

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/1996/22/text/ Probing the mysterious heart of the Crab Nebula, the tattered remains of a stellar cataclysm witnessed more than 900 years ago, astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have found that the Crab is even more dynamic than previously understood, based on a cosmic "movie" assembled from a series of Hubble observations. ... Because of this flickering, the neutron star is also called a "pulsar." ...

. While a Hubble Space Telescope image of visible light emitted by a protoplanetary disk in the Orion Nebula called proplyd 170-337 shows hot, ionized gas (red) surrounding and streaming off of a disk (yellow), 1.3 mm radio observations by CARMA and SMA reveal the dust disk hiding within the hot gas (contours). This protoplanetary disk has a mass more than one hundredth that of the sun, the minimum needed to form a Jupiter-sized planet. Bally et al 2000/Hubble Space Telescope & Eisner et al 2008/CARMA, SMA

... now - return the registration form . May 10 - deadline for conference registration and accommodation form . ... July 1 - final information to participants . ... RETURN] . ... Please send the abstracts to LOC. E-mail address: astro@te.net.ua . ... All participants are requested to fill in the enclosed Registration Form and send it to us before May 10, 1999 (via electronic mail to astro@te.net.ua ) . ... Please complete and return this form (even if you sent the pre-registration form) . ...

... This beautiful new image shows a glowing cloud of cosmic dust (called a nebula) sitting boldly against a backdrop of shining stars. To the naked eye, thick clouds like these appear empty and dark, but some are actually home to the brightest nebulae and hottest young stars in the Universe! Stars are made of gas, so it is no surprise that they are born inside thick gassy clouds. But the clouds that give birth to stars also block our view of them growing within. ...

... We have measured this "redshift" for the pink black holes, and allowed for it in our calculations. ... We see this effect in the emission from gas around these pink black holes, but it is far too small an effect to account for the pinkness. Thus the swirling motions of gas around or into the black holes cannot produc the colour. ... At first we thought that these things were normal blue black holes hidden behind clouds of interstellar dust, that absorbed the blue light and made them appear pink. ...

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 . ...

... A faint, dusty rose of the northern sky, emission nebula IC 410 lies about 12,000 light-years away in the constellation Auriga. The cloud of glowing hydrogen gas is over 100 light-years across, sculpted by stellar winds and radiation from embedded open star cluster NGC 1893. ... These "tadpoles" (seen just below center) are regions of denser, cooler gas, and more slowly resist the erosive radiation from the hot stars. ... Copyright (c) Amateur Telescope Makers of Boston, Inc. ...

National Aeronautics and Space Administration . ... JOHN E. BLAHA (COLONEL, USAF, RET.) NASA ASTRONAUT (FORMER) . ... EDUCATION: Graduated from Granby High School in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1960; received a bachelor of science in engineering science from the United States Air Force Academy in 1965 and a master of science in astronautical engineering from Purdue University in 1966. ... NASA EXPERIENCE: Selected as an astronaut in May 1980, Blaha has logged 161 days in space on 5 space missions. ...