... 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. ...

... 2005 August 8 . Mars to Appear Normal This August . ... Regardless of numerous urban legends circulating, Mars will appear relatively normal in August. October is the best month to see Mars this year. ... As Earth catches up to Mars in their respective orbits around the Sun, Mars will keep rising earlier in the night. On 2005 October 30, Earth will have caught up to Mars and the planets will be the nearest to each other in their orbits -- this time around. ... About APOD | ...

... 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. ...

... NGC 7129 and NGC 7142 . ... This alluring telescopic image looks toward the constellation Cepheus and an intriguing visual pairing of dusty reflection nebula NGC 7129 (left) and open star cluster NGC 7142. The two appear separated by only half a degree on the sky, but they actually lie at quite different distances. ... Tethys, one of Saturn's larger moons at about 1000 kilometers in diameter, survived the collision, but sports today the expansive impact crater Odysseus. ... August . ...

... Like the night sky on the Earth, the martian sky hosts a plethora of astronomical phenomena occurring around the clock in a neverending space opera played out for the benefit of robotic and future human observers alike. ... Moons . Mars has two moons, Phobos and Deimos . ... Under the same conditions, Deimos would be as bright as -5, somewhat brighter than the planet Venus appears in Earth's sky. ... The moons are also eclipsed by Mars itself (a situation analogous to lunar eclipses at the Earth). ...

... To be read in conjunction with Section 4.11 of the WFPC2 Instrument Handbook , -Version 4.0. ... 1 The second study found evidence that CTE loss for faint stars has increased with time (Whitmore, 1998). The primary observational consequence of CTE loss is that a point source at the top of the chip appears to be fainter than if observed at the bottom of the chip, due to the loss of electrons as the star is read out down the chip (see Figure 1 ). ... Last updated: 06/16/98 10:38:00 . ...

... 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) ...

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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 . ...

... 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. ...

... STScI-PRC01-04 HUBBLE'S ULTRAVIOLET VIEWS OF NEARBY GALAXIES YIELD CLUES TO EARLY UNIVERSE Astronomers are using these three NASA Hubble Space Telescope images to help tackle the question of why distant galaxies have such odd shapes, appearing markedly different from the typical elliptical and spiral galaxies seen in the nearby universe. ... Light from these galaxies travels great distances (billions of light-years) to reach Earth. ... These stars emit mostly ultraviolet light. ...

Astronotes Armagh Planetarium's Stellar Blog! ... Space Flight . ... Earth Satellites . ... Leonid meteors seen from 13 km altitude aboard an aircraft during the 1999 Leonids Multi-Instrument Aircraft Campaign (Leonid-MAC). Comet Tempel-Tuttle provides