... 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. ...

... Comet Animation . ... Comet structures are diverse and very dynamic, but they all develop a surrounding cloud of diffuse material, called a coma, that usually grows in size and brightness as the comet approaches the Sun. ... As comets approach the Sun they develop enormous tails of luminous material that extend for millions of kilometers from the head, away from the Sun. ... The evaporated molecules boil off and carry small solid particles with them, forming the comet's coma of gas and dust. ...

... 28.11.2006 . ... Spiral galaxy NGC 1313, however, appears to be alone. ... Pictured above , NGC 1313 spans about 50,000 light years and lies only about 15 million light years away toward the constellation of Reticulum . Continued numerical modeling of galaxies like NGC 1313 might shed some light on its unusual nature. ... Publications with keywords: spiral galaxy - starburst galaxy . Publications with words: spiral galaxy - starburst galaxy . ... Spiral Galaxy M83: The Southern Pinwheel . ...

... Magnetic Storms . ... Cosmic Rays . ... Energetic Particles . ... Solar fast Particles . We cannot observe the way the distant universe accelerates cosmic rays or produces energetic photons, but acceleration processes also occur on our Sun , though on a much more moderate scale. ... That is why such events are often missed by cosmic ray detectors near the equator, where the lowest energies are excluded by the Earth's magnetic field. ... Should we be concerned about solar energetic radiation? ...

We cannot observe the way the distant universe accelerates cosmic rays or produces energetic photons, but acceleration processes also occur on our Sun , though on a much more moderate scale. ... That is why such events are often missed by cosmic ray detectors near the equator, where the lowest energies are excluded by the Earth's magnetic field. The best detectors for observing solar particles are therefore those sensitive to the lowest energies of the cosmic radiation. ...

... 2010 March 30 . Unusual Starburst Galaxy NGC 1313 . ... Brightly lit with new and blue massive stars, star formation appears so rampant in NGC 1313 that it has been labeled a starburst galaxy . ... Pictured above , NGC 1313 spans about 50,000 light years and lies only about 15 million light years away toward the constellation of the Reticle ( Reticulum ). Continued numerical modeling of galaxies like NGC 1313 might shed some light on its unusual nature. ... About APOD | ...

This month's Geminid meteor shower is expected to peak around the late evening of Tuesday 13th/early hours of Wednesday 14th. The shower is usually one of the best of the annual meteor showers, with many relatively bright, slow- to medium-speed fireballs. ... These meteors are believed to originate from the near-Earth asteroid, Phaethon, discovered by a NASA satellite in 1983. ... FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: John McFarland at the Armagh Observatory, College Hill, Armagh, BT61 9DG. ...

... Jitter is usually very small in magnitude and random in effect, and is not expected to lead to systematic throughput changes. ... However, such a change should lead to an obvious decline in the strength of the comparison lines at one end of the spectrum relative to the other and not an overall decline in counts. No such effect is seen (the counts decline evenly from one end of the spectrum to the other). ... The value changes steadily, but not by enough to account for the changes in counts seen. ...

... The awsome spectacle of a brilliant comet, with its long ghostly tail streaming behind it, is a rare event. ... Only one other comet, Comet Halley, was seen so far from the Sun, giving scientists an opportunity to watch it as it slowly warmed up and sprouted a tail. ... Comets are the Rip Van Winkles of the solar system -- mini-worlds that have changed little during their 4.5-billion-year nap far from the Sun. ... Observing Comets . ... Once, comets inhabited the entire solar system. ...

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. ...

2009-05-20 O.Hainaut There are many steps between the data coming out of a camera on a professional telescope and the final image that appears in magazines or on our web sites. ... preliminary: from the telescope to Photoshop. cleaning: remove the artifacts remaining in the image . ... In each filter, several images are acquired. ... Fig 1: a raw image (click for full scale) . ... At this stage, the images are still in FITS, the astronomical format, with one FITS file per filter. ... The final image. ...

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 the cometary debris for the Leonid meteor shower. ... Every 17-19 November Earth crosses Tempel-TuttleтАЩs orbit and the Leonids become visible. With clear, dark skies observers may see 10 to 15 Leonid meteors every hour on those mornings. ...

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 . ...

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 . ...

... 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) ...

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. ...

Supernovae 2010jl in UGC 5189A . This page is devoted to information on Supernova 2010jl in UGC 5189A . ... Astronomy Magazine's Supernova SN 2010jl . ... Bad Astronomy's SN 2010 JL in weird UGC 5189 . SpaceBanter.com 2010jl post . Blogbaker's 2010jl post . Joseph Brimacombe widefield color image . ... 2010/11/04.50 . ... 2010/11/05.203 . ... Joseph Brimacombe . 2010/11/05.467 . ... mirror . ... JM Llapasset . ... 2011/01/15.160 . ... Back to Bright Supernovae - 2010 . ...

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 | ...

... Virginia Kilborn's program gfinder was run on 388 luthered and edge-masked HIPASS cubes , covering the whole southern sky, over all 1024 channels (i.e. -1281 to 12741 km/s), with an HI peak flux cutoff of 60 mJy/beam. ... The large number of candidates is mostly due to artifacts generated in areas of strong continuum flux, mostly the Galactic Plane, (causing a baseline ripple), the HI emission in our Galaxy, and lots of interference (1408 MHz birdie, GPS etc.) ... Number of galaxies: . ... galaxies ...

... 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. ...