... 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. ...

... 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. ...

... Micro Moon over Super Moon . 21.01.2014 . Did you see the big, bright, beautiful Full Moon last Wednesday night? ... On that night, the smallest Full Moon of 2014 reached its full phase only a few hours from lunar apogee, the time of its the most distant point from Earth in the Moon's elliptical orbit. ... How large do things appear when far away? When peering across the universe, the answer can actually tell us about its average gravitational history and hence its composition. ...

... This section highlights some typical FOC image characteristics. ... Occulting fingers located near the aperture entrance if the image size is greater than 512 x 512 pixels or if the FUV prism is in the beam. Reseau marks etched onto the faceplate of the detector to aid in geometric correction ( Figure 4.4 ). ... A faint diagonal parallel striping pattern called pattern noise . ... Warped edges ( Figure 4.4 ). ... Figure 4.5: FOC 512 x 512 Image Showing Faint "Thumbprint" Pattern or "Fringes" . ...

... This program was created for correlating chosen regions in the series of fts images. ... Chosen regions' . ... In this section the program counts the integral for each region of the grid for each image. ... As a matter of fact, the integral is total brightness of the region and it is counted by 'int_tabulated' IDL function. ... In addition, the program will show the count of the regions which correlate with the corresponding region (the brighter region means the bigger count) and its contour. ...

Galaxies are diffuse objects which are imaged against a background of finite brightness and noise. Galaxies which have the maximum contrast with respect to this background are the ones that are first discovered. ... These galaxies have been missed to date but active surveys for them are underway. ... In this page we present several examples of these newly discovered Low Surface Brightness galaxies as well as examples of high surface brightness galaxies. ...

... August 24, 1996 . Why is QSO 1229+204 so Bright? Credit: J. Hutchings ( DAO ), NASA . Explanation: What causes the center of this barred spiral galaxy to light up brighter than almost anything in the universe? ... Not only was QSO 1229+204 at the core of an unusual barred spiral galaxy , but this galaxy was in the process of colliding with a dwarf galaxy . Gas from this collision quite possibly fuels a supermassive black hole causing QSO 1229+204 to shine so brightly. ... About APOD | ...

... STScI-PRC00-34 A BIRD'S EYE VIEW OF A GALAXY COLLISION What appears as a bird's head, leaning over to snatch up a tasty meal, is a striking example of a galaxy collision in NGC 6745. ... However, the situation is quite different for the interstellar media in the above two galaxies - material consisting largely of clouds of atomic and molecular gases and of tiny particles of matter and dust, strongly coupled to the gas. ... The hot blue stars in this image are evidence of this star formation. ...

Astronomy Discussion Forums . ... Atm ћ Astrophotography ћ Blackholes ћ Blackholes2 ћ CCD ћ Celestron ћ Domes ћ Education . ... New Model: How Do The Sun And Moon Appear To Move Across The Sky . ... Post Message | ... focused on the Sun and the Moon as they appear from the given location of the Earth surface: . ... www.astronomy.net . About Astronomy Net | ... Forum posts are Copyright their authors as specified in the heading above the post. "dbHTML," "AstroGuide," "ASTRONOMY.NET" & "VA.NET" . ...

... From Terry Moseley: "A very bright fireball was seen widely over Ireland, and even as far away as Liverpool, at about 00.30 on Sunday morning, 4 April. John McConnell saw it from Maghaberry, Co Antrim, and a woman saw it from her home in Newry, Co Down. The Liverpool observer reports that the fireball appeared at 30 - 40 degrees altitude in the western sky at 00:33 UT on 2009 April 05. ... I saw it) early Sunday morning at 00:32 BST. ... International Year of Astronomy, Ireland National Node . ...

The Wideband Arecibo Pulsar Processor - File Format Page . WAPP files have three sections that appear sequentially in this order: an ASCII header description, the binary header, and finally the actual binary data. ... The WAPP realtime observation engine does not produce files larger that 2 Gbytes. At one time this represented a fundamental limit to Linux files. ... Each file will have it's own header, even when the files are simply continuations of a single observation. ... long int . ...

... Data It is now clear that fuzzballs are actually galaxies. ... Using the automatic telescope, we measured the redshifts and brightnesses of a large number of fuzzballs in all regions of the sky. ... Correlation between brightness and redshift Redshifts and Brightnesses 0.005 0.004 0.003 0.002 0.001 0 -0.001 0 -0.002 -0.003 -0.004 -0.005 Redshift of Fuzzball 500 1000 1500 2000 Brightness of Fuzzball The brightnesses and redshifts of all the fuzzballs measured are shown in this graph. ...

... 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. ...

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 . ...

. Uranus' edge-on rings appear as spikes above and below the planet. The rings cannot be seen running fully across the face of the planet because the bright glare of the planet has been blocked out in the photo (a small amount of residual glare appears as a fan-shaped image artifact, along with an edge between the exposure for the inner and outer rings). NASA, ESA, and M. Showalter (SETI Institute)

... The changebar (represented by two hyphens in the image) appears in the 10px space to the left of the paragraph. The illustration shows a vertical line that represents the left edge of the paragraph's containing block. ... The change bars (two red hyphens) appear to the left of the word "THIS", which begins the fourth line of text. The following PRE element simulates the example. Vertical bars represent the left containing block edge. ... to the left of the line containing | ...

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 . ...

... It is possible to change the meaning of keywords (to `overload' them), but it can be confusing, primarily because your new commands may not behave the same way that this manual claims. ... If you said box in your macro, then overloaded the keyword, you'd have a macro that called itself. ... Another example is that (when overloaded) lines saves the line numbers used, so that you can write a macro to print the top 10 lines of a file (it's called head ). ...

... Night Sky Questions . Q. I saw a bright light streak across the sky last night. ... A. Meteors are the bright trails left by fragments of natural space debris called meteoroids (usually chunks of rock or metal) falling through the EarthтАЩs atmosphere. ... As the Earth moves around the Sun over a year, planets will move in and out of view, so the sky changes.To confirm if it was one of the planets, go to www.heavens-above.com . ... Q. I saw a bright light moving steadily across the sky last night. ...

... These data were originally part of a PhD-thesis at Leiden Observatory by M.H. Wieringa (1991). 1 name Name of source (char8, example : '76W0771*') 2 freq MHz Frequency of source detection in MHz (int, example : 327 or 608 ) 3 ra_1950 radians B1950 Right Ascension (in radians) ( real , example : 2.328327) 4 ra_1950_deg degrees B1950 Right Ascension (in degrees) ( real , example : 133.403290) 5 ra_err seconds Error in RA ( ... 70W : Umi, 327 MHz only, one field. ... Columns 21 Rows 5850...