... 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. ...

... Just one minute before midnight EDT, Friday, August 28, the Space Shuttle Discovery began a long arc into a cloudy sky. ... Shadows of Saturn at Equinox . ... Unusual shadows and dark rings appeared around Saturn near its equinox last month. At that time -- early August -- Saturn's ring plane pointed directly at the Sun. ... Many stars like our Sun were formed in open clusters. ... D. rad Bacteria: Candidate Astronauts . ... Known as an extremophile, bacteria such as D. NGC 7771 Galaxy Group . ...

The red colors in this image show the galaxy M66 as it appears at the submillimeter wavelength of 850 microns, while the white background shows the galaxy as it appears in visible light. Regions of cold dust that appear as dark streaks in the white image glow brightly in the red image. ...

... 2013 November 18 . Aurora and Unusual Clouds Over Iceland . ... On the far left, bright green auroras appear to emanate from the glacier as if it was a volcano . ... On the far right is a long and unusual lenticular cloud tinged with green light emitted from another aurora well behind it. Just above this lenticular cloud are unusual iridescent lenticular clouds displaying a broad spectral range of colors. ... Happy Holidays: Free APOD 2014 Calendar in PDF format . ... About APOD | ...

... 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. ...

... Armagh Observatory, College Hill, Armagh BT61 9DG, +44 (0)28 3752 2928 . Noctilucent clouds as photographed by Mark Bailey from Lisdoart on 14th July 2006 at 11.30 pm. ... These so-called noctilucent (night glowing) clouds (NLCs), are formed by sunlight reflecting off ice crystals high in the atmosphere, and usually appear in the northwest, through north to northeast during twilight in the late spring and summer months at our latitude. ...

... Views of Martian Clouds . ... Although not as pronounced as on Earth , clouds are common features on Mars. The Martian atmosphere has only a trace of water vapor; however, the temperature and pressure is such that the atmosphere is usually close to saturation and produces clouds. Even from Earth based telescopes, clouds have been observed by transient brightening on the surface of Mars. ... Lee waves . ... Wave clouds . ... Image Credit: Calvin J. Hamilton) . Lee Wave . ... Wave Clouds . ...

We report on recent observations of molecular clouds in the tidal Magellanic Bridge; specifically, the Ы?kpc-long, tidally extended "tail" of the Small Magellanic Cloud. In particular, we identify an unusually high 12CO(3-2)/12CO(1-0) ratio of 2-3 to 1, toward one of the clouds, suggesting a warm and dense molecular material associated with imminent or current formation of stars. ...

Astronotes Armagh Planetarium's Stellar Blog! ... Moon . ... Stars . ... Space Flight . ... Monthly Sky Notes . ... June . ... NASA has been studying NCLтАЩs for some time and are trying to determine if there is a relationship between climate change and these wonders of the night sky. ... Spica and Saturn actually form a triangle with the bright orangish star Arcturus which is higher in the sky. ... The ancient Greeks saw the stars of Libra as part of Scorpius, specifically the scorpionтАЩs claws. ...

Check out the new images (Jan 18-25) and (Jan 26-Feb 05) of the comet by Rob McNaught. ... Every few years a comet becomes bright enough to be easily seen with the naked eye but only every decade or so are these comparable with comets like Halley. ... Before Jan 13, the comet is not visible in the Australian sky after sunset. ... SOHO images . ... On Jan 12 at approximately 09:00 UT (8pm NSW time), comet C/2006 P1 McNaught appears at the 11 o'clock position in the images. ... STEREO images . ...

... 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 ...

... The Sun . Does anyone know how many stars are there in the solar system? Come take a look at the Sun. See that? ... Did you know all the stars you see when you look up are inside our galaxy! ... Did you know that our Sun and solar system were born in a cloud of gas and dust like this. ... We're looking at a place where stars are being born. ... Sharing the Universe is based upon work supported by the Informal Education Division of the National Science Foundation under Grant no DRL-0638873. ...

... Observers looking at an object that is moving away from them see light that has a longer wavelength than it had when it was emitted (a redshift), while observers looking at an approaching source see light that is shifted to shorter wavelength (a blueshift). ... By measuring the amount of the shift to the red, we can determine that the bright galaxy is moving away at 3,000 km/sec, which is 1 percent of the speed of light, because its lines are shifted in wavelength by 1 percent to the red. ... Part 2...

... Some people have asked why Venus appears in "different places" in these photos. ... Dave Wallace . ... It was taken from Brookline, NH using my Celestron 5" SCT through a Tutill Solar Skreen filter using Fuji Superia Reala color print film. ... Marblehead Middle School Fifth Grade Students viewed the 2004 Transit of Venus from Riverhead Beach on Marblehead Harbor when the Sun broke through the clouds at about 6:45 a.m. Eyepiece projection with my 8" Meade SCT and Televue 32mm Plossl worked well. ...

... The ancient chronical said about the colour rings around the Sun and the Moon, about three suns in the sky, light columns, bright lightning, different "comets" rushing to the Earth, moving among the stars or round the Earth with the sky. All these occurrences may be divided into three categories: one that occur in the near or far space, processes going on in the Earth atmosphere under the influence of cosmic factors and at last the occurrences connected with the Earth atmosphere. ... Rainbow . ...

True Color Image Gallery: Galactic SNR | Magellanic Cloud SNR . ... Chandra Proposer's Guide pile up section ] During frame readout, the ACIS CCDs take 40 microsec to (parallel) transfer the charge by one pixel. As a result of this, each frame readout, each pixel is exposed for 40 microsec to a source (plus cosmic X-ray background) at each location along its column. ... Note also that the image does not just trail, it extends along the whole column. ... Chandra Supernova Remnant Catalog . ...

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 | ...

In this gallery are many images of Low Surface Brightness Galaxies which have recently been discovered and analyzed. ... The central surface brightness of this galaxy is 24.28 . Malin 2 This galaxy is another huge disk galaxy with a scale length of 15 kpc and a redshift of 15000 km/a. The high surface brightness knot in one of its spiral arms actually has the same color, luminosity and H-alpha equivalent width as the entire Large Magellanic Cloud . ... Truly it is a Low Surface Brightness Galaxy. ...

A team of U.S. and German astrophysicists have made the first ever detection of X-rays coming from a comet. ... Following the initial detection, the team reported repeated X-ray emissions from the comet over the next 24 hours. ... One preliminary theory is that X-ray emission from the Sun was absorbed by a cloud of gaseous water molecules surrounding the nucleus of the comet, and then were re-emitted by the molecules in a process physicists call "fluorescence." ... Comets . ...

Supernova 1987A in LMC . One day in 1987, an astronomer by the name of Ian Shelton was making observations of the Tarantula Nebula in Large Magellanic cloud at Las Campanas Observatory, and he noticed something strange on his image. ... SN 1987A got as bright as 2.7, the only other recent SN even to come close was 1885A in M31 which got up to mag 6. ... Mag 4.5 . ... IAUC 4318 2/25/87 Type II? ... IAUC 7354 2/1/00 New structure in the inner ring . ... IAUC 7360 2/7/00 HST observation of new spot . ...