... Sometimes staring into empty space is useful. Pictured above is a region of sky that was picked because it had, well, nothing: no bright stars, no bright galaxies, and no picturesque nebulas. What could not be avoided, however, were a few stars in our own Galaxy, and many distant galaxies strewn across the universe. ... The center of our Galaxy is obscured in visible light by dark dust that rotates with the stars in the Galactic Plane. ... Many Moons . ... A Deep Field In The Southern Sky . ...

... 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. ...

... 2001 April 24 . NGC 2264: Stars, Dust, and Gas . ... Explanation: The nebula surrounding bright star S Mon is filled with dark dust and glowing gas. The strange shapes that haunt this star forming region originate from fine interstellar dust reacting in complex ways to the energetic light and hot gas being expelled by the young stars. ... The blue glow directly surrounding S Mon results from reflection , where neighboring dust reflects light from the bright star. ... About APOD | ...

... 2000 April 24 . Reflection Nebula M78 . ... Explanation: An eerie blue glow and ominous columns of dark dust highlight M78, a bright reflection nebula in the constellation of Orion . The dust not only absorbs light, but also reflects the light of several bright blue stars that formed recently in the nebula. ... M78 belongs to the larger Orion Molecular Cloud Complex that contains the Great Nebula in Orion and the Horsehead Nebula . ... About APOD | ...

... This beautiful new image shows a glowing cloud of cosmic dust 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. ...

... 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 ...

... SEARCH ASP SITE: Match ALL words Match ANY word . ... ASP Conference Series . ... Accidental Astrophysics: The Devil's In the Magnitudes, Part II . ... The star second to the Sun in brilliance is Sirius. ... Recall the magnitude system, passed down to us through a hundred generations of sky watchers, as a means of quantifying stellar brightness ("Accidental Astrophysics," May/June, p. 9). ... Yes, it is a magnitude difference, but that difference is due to the distance between us and the star. ...

... From Terry Moseley: "A very bright fireball was seen widely over Ireland, and even as far away as Liverpool, at about 00.30 on Sunday morning, 4 April. John McConnell saw it from Maghaberry, Co Antrim, and a woman saw it from her home in Newry, Co Down. The Liverpool observer reports that the fireball appeared at 30 - 40 degrees altitude in the western sky at 00:33 UT on 2009 April 05. ... I saw it) early Sunday morning at 00:32 BST. ... International Year of Astronomy, Ireland National Node . ...

... Armagh Planetarium . ... Universe . ... Posted on January 19, 2012 | ... Continue Reading.. ... 1 Comment A new image of the Omega Nebula reveals amazing detail in a cosmic landscape of gas clouds, dust and newborn stars.€а Captured by the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the [ ] . ... Welcome to our annual guide to what the Universe has waiting [ ] . ... The furthest you can travel from home across the [ ] . ... This local school has its own observatory and astronomy club for the students [ ] . ...

... 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. ...

... Circumstellar disc of beta Pictoris: constraints on grain properties from polarization. To appear in the Astronomy & Astrophysics . abs , src , ps ] . ... Dust influx to Titan from Hyperion . ... abs ] . ... Characteristics of bulges and disks in interacting galaxies . ... Dust grains around Herbig Ae/Be stars: porous, cometary-like grains? ... To appear in the Astronomy & Astrophysics Supplement . ... Finally, Links may lead you to more options (e.g. via the LANL preprint system). ...

... 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. ...

Gratteri Crater, 4.3 miles (6.9 km) across, has a ray pattern whose most distant rays reach about 450 miles (600 km) and perhaps farther. Lunar rays appear bright, but GratteriтАЩs look dark because the image was taken at night by thermal infrared light. In the infrared, rocky areas are bright because they still hold daytime warmth. ... Unlike other ray craters, Gratteri occurred in ancient terrain and may be the source of the oldest Mars meteorite, ALH84001. ...

... Comet Animation . ... Comet structures are diverse and very dynamic, but they all develop a surrounding cloud of diffuse material, called a coma, that usually grows in size and brightness as the comet approaches the Sun. ... As comets approach the Sun they develop enormous tails of luminous material that extend for millions of kilometers from the head, away from the Sun. ... The evaporated molecules boil off and carry small solid particles with them, forming the comet's coma of gas and dust. ...

... Volodymyr Kuzkov, Sergii Kuzkov, Zoran Sodnik - Direct measurements of laser light aberration from the ARTEMIS geostationary satellite through thin clouds // arXiv.org - New resalts to paper at Conference ICSOS-2014, Kobe, Japan, May 7-9 (2014), S4-4, [view pdf file] . ... Kuz'kov V., Volovyk D., Kuzkov S., Sodnik Z., Pukha S. - Realization of Laser Experiments with ESA'S Geostationary Satellite ARTEMIS. ... Preparation to Optical Communication Experiments With ARTEMIS Satellite. ... V.P. Kuz`kov. ...

... The bright supernova (hereafter SN) in the galaxy NGC 4527 was first sighted by S. Knight (USA) on April 13.17UT at magnitude ~14.0v. The report of the sighting was subsequently forwarded by phone to the AAVSO. ... SN 1991T. The galaxy NGC 4527 is an Sb(s)II type galaxy with an apparent Blue magnitude of 11.32 (Shapley-Ames, 1981). ... An analysis of this event utilizing visual observations by amateurs, plus a light curve is presented.. ... THE LIGHT CURVE: . ... ISN SN 1991T web page . ...

. This color image was obtained with Fuji color film (Super Plus 400) in focal plane of the 70-cm reflector (F = 27 m) at Lisniki Observatory by A.M.Evtushevsky. Data and time of observation: April 27, 1997, 21:25 LT. Comet-Earth distance: 1.7 a.u. Time of exposure: 10 min. Field of view : 3 minutes of arc. Distance between shells, in average: 15 000 km. Diameter of bright coma in the picture center: of about 5 000 km. Last updated: January, 2005.

... Phase light curves of binary model that consists of a primary component with mass M 1 and a secondary component with mass M 2 . ... The input parameters of the problem are the accretion rate onto the binary components ( ), the component mass ratio q = M 2 /M 1 , the orbital inclination to the line of sight , the eccentricity e, the rotation angle of the apsidal line relative to the observer , and the parameter c characterizing viscosity. ...

... 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). ...

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