... 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. ...

From: TerryMosel aol.com Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2004 18:35:52 EDT Subject: Dunsink IS to close Hi all, I have now heard, unofficially but from a usually reliable source, that Dunsink Observatory is to close as a working institution on that site at the end of January. The decision was taken at the DIAS Board meeting earlier this week. ... It is after all the public who pay for DIAS Dunsink, and they are entitled to get something back for their money! ... Terry Moseley . ...

3) Planets and Brown Dwarfs . ... By its nature, this method is most sensitive to massive planets orbiting close to their stars. ... That means that some of the more massive extrasolar planets could actually be brown dwarfs (although the statistics of the finds suggest that most of them are not). ... Another possible difference between brown dwarfs and massive planets is how they are born. ... They would base the fundamental definition on the mode of formation: a planet is built from planetesimals. ...

... Dark Shuttle Approaching . ... NGC 7023: The Iris Nebula . ... Sometimes called the Iris Nebula, NGC 7023 is not the only nebula in the sky to evoke the imagery of flowers, though. ... M31: The Andromeda Galaxy . ... Our Galaxy is thought to look much like Andromeda. ... One of the most identifiable nebulae in the sky, the Horsehead Nebula in Orion, is part of a large, dark, molecular cloud. ... Shiny NGC 253 is one of the brightest spiral galaxies visible, and also one of the dustiest. ...

... 2014 August 3 . Dark Shuttle Approaching . Image Credit: Space Station Expedition 22 Crew, NASA . ... Pictured above , Endeavour was imaged near Earth's horizon as it approached, where several layers of the Earth's atmosphere were visible. ... Tasks completed during this shuttle's visit to the ISS included the delivery of the Tranquility Module which contained a cupola bay window complex that allows even better views of spaceships approaching and leaving the space station. ... About APOD | ...

The First Law (1): Energy is Conserved in a closed system: . ... We usually consider work and heat flow as the two kinds of energy . The Second Law (2): The Law of Entropy: . ... The amount of disorder increases . ... You can not go from a disordered system to an ordered system without inputting more energy (this is the most important attribute of the second law) . ... In no way can we recover work of that this disordered system without putting energy into the system. ... More on Thermodynamics . ...

The following are some standard questions that observers have about their fixed target confirmation charts. ... Why doesn't my target appear to be centered on the cross hairs? ... How is proper motion handled? ... Target well centered . If your target is not perfectly centered in the cross hairs, see the questions below for why it may not be centered and how well centered it must be . ... So, targets to be acquired by STIS should appear well centered in the cross hairs on the confirmation chart. ...

ChangeLog for rgsspecplot =============================== Version 2.16.13 - 2002-12-12 (NW) ------------------------------- Changed the way of embedding figures to \epsfig, so that the figures appear in the electronic documentation. ... The documentation has also been updated. ... Version 2.17.2 - 2002-07-25 (NW) ------------------------------- Removed the dependency on the STAT_ERR column, now use the square root of the counts as the error, to close the SPR 2949, `Task unable to plot total spectrum'. ...

... 18apr06 power supply fault contactor not closing. 20apr06: Solution: problem was the digital i/o board. POWER1 signal not arriving. ... At 49880 the master contactor is open so there is no power to the power supplies. ... The problem turned out to be the digital i/o board that drove the POWER1 signal to the master contactor relay. ... The master contactor relay is now being driven through the power supply fault contactor relay and then the little star POWER2 relay. ...

OptInt PmWiki : MROI Delay Line SW / VME . One RT task for all delay lines, triggered by single interrupt source. RT task performs somewhat different functions when seeking datum switch (always in slew mode). Want capability to run software in an emulator mode, on VME platform under Xenomai, but without any interface boards. ... Algorithm for step pre-filter. ... Printable View of http://www.mrao.cam.ac.uk/projects/OAS/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/MROIDelayLineSW/VME) ...

Next: Reading and Writing Visibilities Up: UV Data Sets Previous: General . The routine uvopen opens a uv data set and readies it for access. Here dataname is a string giving the data set's name. Status can be either 'old' or 'new' , depending whether an old data set is being read, or a new data set is being created. Tno is an integer handle passed back by the open routine (and is used for all future access to the data set). The routine uvclose closes the data set. ...

Comets necessarily obey the same physical laws as every other object. ... If one considers only two bodies -- either the Sun and a planet, or the Sun and a comet -- the smaller body appears to follow an elliptical path or orbit about the Sun, which is at one focus of the ellipse. ... Another quantity that is conserved is called angular momentum. ... Comets simply are bodies which in general have more angular momentum per unit mass than do planets and therefore move in more elongated orbits. ...

. Album : Фотоальбом Сергея Аюкова :: Travels to distant places and countries :: 1994/12 Tenerife, Canary Islands :: Walking to nearby mountain. It's only 1 km high but right from the sea level! . Up . << Prev . The top is close, and Sergei bets he can reach it in half hour. It appeared that it was less than 20 minutes walk . Next >> . Photo album generated by album tool from Dave's MarginalHacks on Wed Jun 5 20:38:28 2013 .

... In temperate latitudes, this is a good time to see halos formed by clouds of ice crystals high in the atmosphere where the temperature is always well down below -30 deg. ... The most prominent halos, however, appear quite close to the sun where it can be uncomfortably bright to look. ... In a sense, halos are like rainbows, glories and coronae in that they require the presence of a bright source of light, the Sun or the Moon, and water floating in the air. ...

In 2001, Westerbork observations of the disturbed galaxy named VV-29 (alias Arp-188, UGC-10214) showed that there is second smaller galaxy (named VV-29c) that appears behind the western side of the main body of the distorted galaxy. ... The galaxy was featured as the May 2, 2002 Astronomy Picture of the Day . ... When VV-29 had its 15 minutes of fame in May 2002, it appeared under the name "The Tadpole Galaxy," but based on the images above, we will always think of it as "The CHAINSAW"! ...

... SS433 is a close binary system, one star is a supergiant, a second one is a black hole. ... Even a black hole cannot accept such an enormous mass flux, a supercritical accretion disk appears, all the excess gas glows up to several tens of thousands degrees and is ejected off the disk with enormous velocities. ... SAO researchers have found an evidence of the supercritical accretion onto a black hole in SS433, which follows from a brightness variability of the SS433 disk. ...

The Status popup displays useful information about the state of sets, regions, and graphs. ... When the number of sets is less than 30, this button is not needed, use the scroll bars to view the status of the sets that are not shown in the display. ... Operations in the Status popup are performed by clicking on the operation, then clicking on one or more set numbers shown in the display. ... Clicking on Copy followed by clicking on a set number in the scrolled window will select the set to copy from. ...

... In the US and in other mid-latitude countries north of the equator (e.g those of Europe), the sun's daily trip (as it appears to us) is an arc across the southern sky. ... Moss avoids direct sunlight, and with the sun's path curving across the southern sky, the north side of a tree-trunk is the one most shaded. ... In addition, they are invariably tilted at an angle around 450, to make sure that the arrival of the sun's rays is as close to perpendicular as possible. ...

... A closed surface (i.e. a compact surface without boundary) is homeomorphic to either a sphere with g handles (a connected sum of a sphere with g tori) or to a sphere with g M obius bands attached (a connected sum of a sphere with g copies of RP 2 ). A compact surface with boundary is homeomorphic to a closed surface with a nite number of disks deleted. ... Prove that on the sphere with g handles the maximal number of nonintersecting closed curves not dividing this surface is equal to g. IV.11. ...