Today's APOD | ... Editor's choices for the most educational Astronomy Pictures of the Day about open clusters: . APOD: 2006 January 9 - M45: The Pleiades Star Cluster . ... The Pleiades contains over 3000 stars, is about 400 light years away, and only 13 light years across. ... Two types of star clusters are visible in our Milky Way Galaxy : open clusters and globular clusters . ... Aged 80 million years, M47 is a smaller but looser cluster of about 50 stars spanning 10 light-years. ... Index | ...

... Galactic or open star clusters are relatively young swarms of bright stars born together near the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy. Separated by about a degree on the sky, two nice examples are M46 (upper left) 5,400 light-years in the distance and M47 (lower right) only 1,600 light-years away toward the nautical constellation Puppis . Around 300 million years young M46 contains a few hundred stars in a region about 30 light-years across. ... M7: Open Star Cluster in Scorpius . ...

... Science User Portal . ... Travel and Contacts . ... Galaxy Clusters . ... Star Clusters . ... This chart shows the constellation of Puppis (The Poop) and includes all the stars that can be seen with the unaided eye on a clear and dark night. This region of the sky includes some bright star clusters, chief amongst them Messier 47 (circled) and its contrasting sister cluster Messier 46. Both clusters are well seen in small telescopes, with Messier 47 having far fewer, but brighter, stars. ...

Stellar Clusters are very useful laboratories for empirically studying stellar evolution. ... All cluster stars are at the same distance . All cluster stars have the same physical age . ... CM diagram Young Cluster In this case we see the Main Sequence fully represented. The blue dots represent massive stars with short main sequence lifetimes. ... Thus, identifying the most massive star which is still on the main sequence is an effective means of determining the age of a stellar cluster. ...

... Radio source identifications . The Web-server of the Astronomical Institute of the St.-Petersburg University opens the experimental service on assignment of clusters data. At present only the data about radio sources in ACO clusters of galaxies are reasonably complete, while only restricted optical information is in our database. Later on, we also intend to include X-ray data and data about brightest cluster galaxies (BCG). ... ACO: radio optic ( for example, A0690 and " optic "), . ...

Astronotes Armagh Planetarium's Stellar Blog! ... Comets and Asteroids . ... Image credit:ESO/J.Emerson/VISTA. ... However others are less pessimistic and it has even been claimed that the mysterious ?Wow! signal? received in 1977 originated from the direction M55.б  Sadly, this still unexplained pulse of radio energy originated from a location rather to the northwest of M55 so I doubt if the source was this cluster (if indeed the signal was genuinely of extraterrestrial origin). ... Mysterious Wow! ...

... This paper ( Burke et al. 2003 ) describes the creation of one such catalogue - the Southern Serendipitous High-redshift Archival ROSAT Cluster (SHARC) survey - which covers an area of 17.7 deg 2 and consists of 32 clusters with redshifts between 0.05 and 0.7 and X-ray luminosities between 7 x 10 42 and 4 x 10 44 erg/s: the high-redshift subsample contains 16 clusters with = 0.3 and X-ray luminosities greater than 2 x 10 43 erg/s (luminosities are quoted for the 0.5 - 2.0 keV energy band). ... 1997 ...

... From the data taken during Cycle 1, surface brightness profiles have been obtained for 13 globular clusters in M31 (Fusi Pecci et al. 1993), leading also to the detection of a central cusp in a candidate post-core-collapse cluster (Bendinelli et al. ... Surface brightness profiles obtained with VISTA. ... PSF 512 512, data matrix smaller and smaller (256 256, 128 128, 64 64), sky = 0, RMG (Fig. 3b): the derived profiles remain unaffected a part from the reduction in radial extension. ...

... Ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) are located in external galaxies, their X-ray luminosities (10 39 - 10 41 erg/s) are thousand times greater than those of brightest black holes in the Galaxy. ULXs may be supercritical accretion disks around black holes of stellar masses (~10 Solar masses) like that in SS433, or they may be a hypothetical intermediate-mass black holes (hundreds - thousands Solar masses) with standard accretion disks. ... 2) The ULX progenitors were ejected from the star clusters. ...

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... Bad Astronomy . ... Bitesize Astronomy . ... The next step up are true clusters, called open clusters . Open clusters (sometimes misleadingly called "galactic clusters") are groups of stars ranging in size from a few dozen stars up to tens of thousands. ... The youngest is about 1 or 2 million years old, while the oldest is about 6 or 7 billion years, making it just older than our own solar system. ... So by looking at the stars in the cluster we can tell pretty well how old they are. ...

... STScI-PRC00-25 A DYING STAR IN GLOBULAR CLUSTER M15 The globular cluster Messier 15 is shown in this color image obtained with the NASA Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2). ... Known as Kuestner 648, this was the first planetary nebula to be identified in a globular cluster. ... At the present time, the most massive stars remaining in M15 have about 80 percent of the mass of our Sun, a fact that makes the existence of a planetary nebula like K 648 something of a mystery. ...

... Structure of Data . ... Catalog . ... In SAI OCL Catalog, we introduce our work on investigation of the Milky Way system of open star clusters. The main goal of our study is a search for new clusters using huge surveys. 168 new clusters have been already discovered by us using J,H,Ks data from 2MASS point source catalog. ... For 141 new clusters, we found their physical parameters using J,H,Ks data from 2MASS catalog and, for a number of clusters, our UBVRI CCD observational magnitudes. ...

An eight-billion-year-old cluster of stars 13,000 light-years from Earth, called NGC 6791, can be seen in the image. ... This particular cluster is called an open cluster, because the stars are loosely bound and have started to spread out from each other. The area pictured is 0.2 percent of Kepler's full field of view, and shows hundreds of stars in the constellation Lyra. The image has been color-coded so that brighter stars appear white, and fainter stars, red. ...

home publications > mercury . ... Big Clusters, Tiny Galaxies . ... Astronomers struggle to understand why giant star clusters form in the tiniest of galaxies . ... These clusters are probably young versions of globular clusters, but they are commonly called super star clusters. Seven dwarf galaxies within 16 million light-years have formed super star clusters, with one of these galaxies, NGC 1569, possessing two young clusters. ... Super star clusters have a lot to tell us about star formation. ...

GALAXIES cenA .tiff 40 Bright Radio Galaxy M31.tiff Nikon Andromeda Galaxy (note HII regions in spiral arms) ngc6744.tiff 40 NGC 6744 a face-on spiral clouds_20d.tiff H'blad The Magellanic Clouds our nearest neighbours Lmc_7.tiff Nikon The Large Magellanic Clouds Lmc_zoom.tiff Nikon Detail of previous image smc_7.tiff Nikon The Small Magellanic Clouds smc-zoom.tiff Nikon Detail of previous image 30dor_40_BVR.tiff 40 The 30 Dor ... B [OIII] Halpha trifid.tiff 40" The Trifid Nebula. ...

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Proposal Identi cation No.: A1511 Date Received: 2001-Feb-01 17:39:36 Technical Page Proposal Type: Regular General Category: Astronomy Sub-Category: Spectroscopy Observation Category: Extragalactic Total Time Requested: 20 Hours Proposal Title: Low Surface Brightness Galaxies in X-ray Emitting Clusters ABSTRACT: Successful surveys for the detection of low surface brightness disk galaxies have been primarily undertaken in spiral rich clusters with little or no X-ray emission. ...

... LMC Project Outline . NGC 1818 Initial Results . ... The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is uniquely suitable for the study of massive star clusters at all stages of evolution. By combining HST observations of these clusters with N-body models we hope to understand the origin and evolution of rich star clusters in our own Galaxy, in the LMC, and beyond. ... We aim to combine our HST observations with N-body models to understand the formation and evolution of globular clusters. ...

... In typical nightly use, the wide field and planetary telescope and cameras record images of favorably placed objects in the sky, including constellations, bright variable stars, nebulae through narrow-band filters, comets, the Moon, and planets. ... Shared Skies telescopes are available for use by students at the University of Louisville and the University of Southern Queensland, and by teachers and students in middle and high schools mentored by faculty at the universities. ...