Browse the articles below for new ideas for your classroom. Mercury September/October 2005: Astronomy Education and Public Outreach: Steps and Missteps Toward an Emerging Profession (pdf) . Focus on Education articles as they appeared in Mercury: . ... March/April 2000: . ... Education Newswire articles as they appeared in Mercury, by issue. ... January/February 2000 . November/December 1999 . ... March/April 1999 . ... November/December 1998 . ... November/December 1997 . ...

... Tonight's Sky . ... Sky this Month . ... Star Atlas . ... stars . ... The Sky This Week: April 1 - 10 . ... Observing springtime deep-sky objects with a large telescope . ... Why do some stars appear to flash a variety of different colors when you look at them through a telescope? ... So, Earthт??s atmosphere will bend some colors from especially bright stars more so than others, which makes the source look like itт??s flashing colors. Get instant access to subscriber content on Astronomy.com! ...

... 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. ...

... The ADS abstract service at: http://adswww.harvard.edu has been updated considerably in the last year. New capabilities in the search engine include searching for multi-word phrases and searching for various logical combinations of search terms. ... The ADS is currently used by over 10,000 users per month, which retrieve over 4.5 million references and over 250,000 full article pages each month. ... Quick Updates: The quick updates allow us to quickly enter new data into the database. ...

... 2010 November 29 . Dark Belt Reappearing on Jupiter . Credit: NASA's JPL , U. Oxford , UC Berkeley , Gemini Obs. ... Explanation: Why are planet-circling clouds disappearing and reappearing on Jupiter? ... Earlier this year, unexpectedly, Jupiter's dark Southern Equatorial Belt (SEB) disappeared. ... Detailed professional observations revealed that high-flying light-colored ammonia -based clouds formed over the planet-circling dark belt. ... About APOD | ... A service of: ASD at NASA / GSFC . ...

Intricately structured filaments of gas and dust compose the reflection nebula seen around the Pleiades star cluster. These multiwavelength images were presented to the American Astronomical Society meeting in San Antonio, TX on January 16, 1996. Click here for the press release text . ... The Schmidt data were processed further after this photo release; better versions are now available.] Get image: 512x512 (56k) / 1024x1024 (204k) . Pleiades Far-Infrared Heated Dust Emission . ...

... The Solar System from MESSENGER . ... The Sun's planets all appear as points of light, with the closest and largest planets appearing the brightest. Star Size Comparisons . ... To help illustrate the answer, a beautiful land, cloud, and skyscape was captured earlier this month over NeuchБtel, Switzerland. ... What's happened to these clouds? ... Spiral Galaxy NGC 2841 Close Up . ... Planetary Nebula Project . ... Inside the nebula lies an open cluster of bright young stars designated NGC 2244. ...

Titan . ... Hubble Space Telescope Images of Titan's surface . ... Later that year, it will release the European-built Huygens probe for a descent through Titan's atmosphere. ... This artist's rendering shows the European Space Agency's Huygens probe descending into the atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan after being released by NASA's Cassini spacecraft. ... This artist's rendering shows the Huygens probe on the surface of Saturn's moon Titan after being released by NASA's Cassini spacecraft. ...

Lunar Libration . Articles | ... Actually, a slight rocking motion, called libration,* makes about 59% of the Moon's surface visible from our planet Earth -- though only 50% at any one time. ... Add to that, the approximate 1.5 degree tilt of the Moon's equator to the ecliptic, and you have the inclination of the Moon's equator to the plane of its orbit around Earth at some 6.5 degrees (5 + 1.5 = 6.5). ... Re-published on Astronomy Net with permission of the author. ... www.astronomy.net . ...

One of my on-going research interests concerns the dust shells of proto-planetary nebulae or PPNs (also called pre-planetary nebulae, transition objects, and post-AGB objects in the literature; the latter term also applies to a wider selection of objects such as RV Tauri stars), especially the carbon-rich ones that show the unidentified "21 micron' emission feature. ... I am working to find a complete sample of proto-planetary nebulae in these satellite galaxies from the millions of detected stars. ...

... Aims: Today, large ground-based instruments, like VISIR on the VLT, providing diffraction-limited (about 0.3 arcsec) images in the mid-infrared where strong PAH features appear enable us to see the flaring structure of the disks around Herbig Ae stars. Although great progress has been made in modelling the disk with radiative transfer models able to reproduce the spectral energy distribution (SED) of Herbig Ae stars, the constraints brought by images have not been yet fully exploited. ...

Phobos . Mars I . Phobos [FOH-bohs] (fear) is a moon of Mars and was named after an attendant of the Roman war god Mars. ... Phobos shows striated patterns which are probably cracks caused by the impact event of the largest crater on the moon. ... The striking feature in this image is the giant Stickney crater. ... Courtesy NASA) . ... Because Phobos is only 28 by 20 kilometers (17 by 12 miles), the moon must have been nearly shattered from the force of the impact that caused the giant crater. ...

... Here some data observed on the 6m telescope with IFP installed in the OLD focal reducer are presented. ... Mkn 3: velocity field . ... NGC 5252: [OIII] image . ... NGC 5252 was observed 23 Feb. 1998 in the [OIII]5007 emission line with CCD TK1024 as detector. ... We observed the ionized gas velocity fields of the spiral galaxies with two purpose. ... Restored velocity field of NGC 157 in the reference frame rotating with the pattern speed overlaid on the Ha image of the galaxy . ... NGC 4100 . ...

The attention of the scientific world has been gripped by the publication of work by two former research students at Armagh Observatory, namely Dr Enric Pall and his wife, Dr Pilar Monta s-Rodr guez . ... What is unusual about their work is that the spectrum was obtained during a total lunar eclipse meaning that the light had passed tangentially through the Earth's atmosphere before illuminating the Moon. ... 028-3752-2928; FAX: 028-3752-7174; cjb arm.ac.uk; jmf arm.ac.uk . ...

... In 1995, two intermittent detector features (aka hotspots) particular to the ROSAT HRI have been noticed on the edge of the HRI field. ... To view the hotspots: . HS #1 > xdisplay "rh123456n00.qp[key=(rawx,rawy)][186:697,230:741]" HS #2 > xdisplay "rh123456n00.qp[key=(rawx,rawy)][3380:3891,297:808]" HS #3 > xdisplay "rh123456n00.qp[key=(rawx,rawy)][2753:3252,3065:3564]" OR > xexamine rh...qp[key=(rawx,rawy)] [HS #1, if present, appears as a spot in the lower left; HS #2 in the lower right.] ...

... ESO, the European Southern Observatory . ... Travel and Contacts . Travel to ESO Headquarters . ... ESO . ... Survey Telescopes . ... ESO Supernova . ... Star Clusters . ... Stars@ESO . ... ESO 3.6-metre telescope . ... MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope . ... ESO 1-metre Schmidt telescope . ... Future Projects . ... This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows the positions of the past, present and predicted future appearances of the Refsdal supernova behind the galaxy cluster€а MACS J1149+2223 . ...

The McDonald 30-inch Prime Focus camera (f/2.98) uses a thick, front-side illuminated Loral-Fairchild 2048x2048 CCD with a Metachrome II coating. ... Hence, placing a 2048x2048 CCD at the Prime Focus would result in an angular field of view of approximately 1 square degree. ... These kinds of galaxies, previously unknown, represent a new population of objects that has recently been discovered by members of our team (see May 1994 issue of Discover magazine) using wide field CCD imaging techniques. ...

... Article text . ... Article should be formatted according to the present rules, using the styles containing in the attached file example.doc . ... For example, article name should be typed in string Here Is the Paper Title , using style "title paper", etc. ... Title part of article Paper Title (style Title Paper . ... It is necessary to use style text paper for the body of article. ... In the text of article there should be links to every Figure and Table: Fig. 1 and Tab. 1 accordingly. ...

... Observing . ... Solar Observing . ... April 3 (SUN) - Solar Observing, Central Park , Manhattan . ... APRIL'S SKY . ... Lecture Series at the American Museum of Natural History The Amateur Astronomers Association is proud to present an astronomy lecture series from October through May each year for our members and the .. ... The€аAmateur Astronomers Association of New York€аwas organized in 1927 to promote the study of Astronomy, emphasizing its cultural and inspirational value. ...

... Planet Peril in Prague: What Happened To Pluto . Dr. Owen Gingerich, Harvard University . ... This month’s meeting will feature Dr. Owen Gingerich, Professor Emeritus of Astronomy and of the History of Science, at Harvard University and a senior astronomer emeritus at the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. This past summer, Professor Gingerich chaired the International Astronomical Union’s planet definition committee. ... Copyright (c) Amateur Telescope Makers of Boston, Inc. ...