... Armagh Observatory, College Hill, Armagh BT61 9DG, +44 (0)28 3752 2928 . ... Aurora . ... Corona . Fireballs . ... Zodiacal Light . ... The first thing to do is get acquainted with what the night sky looks like. ... The National Schools Observatory web site has very good horizon views of the sky for the current night. ... If the object is moving slowly across the sky then it may be one of the larger satellites. ... Cloudbait Observatory - October 2002 . ... October 2003 Aurora at Armagh . ...

... Image Quality of the VLT . Total Optical Control . First light for the ESO VLT unit telescope 1 occurred during the workshop. ... The image shown (Figure 1 ) here was obtained with the VLT on May 16, 1998, in red light (R band), i.e. while the mirror was still uncoated. ... In this diagram (FIgure 2), the measured image quality of the VLT UT1 astronomical images is plotted versus the ``seeing", as measured by the Seeing Monitor, a small telescope also located on top of the Paranal Mountain. ...

... Bad Astronomy . Misconceptions . ... Bad Astronomy : "We're light years more advanced than our competition!" ... Even the closest astronomical object, the Moon, is 400,000 kilometers away! ... A beam of light will travel 9,500,000,000,000 kilometers in one year. This distance is defined as a light year ; the distance light travels in a year. ... This is another example of Bad Astronomy; like a light year, a parsec is a unit of distance, not time (to be specific, it equals 3.26 light years) . ...

... ESO is building what will be the World's largest optical telescope array, The Very Large Telescope (VLT). The VLT Project organisation is responsible for the design and construction of the Unit Telescopes, including enclosures, optics, adapter-rotators and coating unit. ... Unit Telescopes Overview - This page is outdated, an update is in process. ... Secondary mirror (M2 Unit) - This page is outdated, an update is in process. ... Coating Unit - This page is outdated, an update is in process. ...

... Bionic eyes. If our eyes could see in different wavelength bands, this is what the Sun would look like. ... Visible light, crucial to photosynthesis, is a type of radiation. ... At the heart of this revolution is the recognition that light travels as a wave. ... Dreams of Fields . ... By the time the fields go from strong to weak and back to strong, the wave has moved a certain distance, known as the wavelength. ... Red light, blue light, infrared light, ultraviolet light, radio waves, x-rays ? ...

... The Frothy Milky Way . ... The dust between stars in our galaxy appears.. ... Polaris: The North Star . ... Based on recent results, this artist's vision of the double star Phi Persei, 720 light years away, shows a bright, rapidly rotating massive star surrounded by a disk of gas. ... New Stars In 30 Doradus . ... Massive Stars Of 30 Doradus . ... This gorgeous visible-light Hubble Space Telescope image shows a young cluster of massive stars at the center of the 30 Doradus Nebula. ...

... January 26, 1997 . Aurora and Orion . Credit: STS-59 Crew , NASA . Explanation : Looking toward the south from low Earth orbit, the crew of the Space Shuttle Endeavor made this stunning time exposure of the Aurora Australis or southern lights in April of 1994. Aurora are visible at high northern latitudes as well, with the northern lights known as Aurora Borealis . ... The reddish colors occur at the highest altitudes (about 200 miles) where the air is least dense. ... About APOD > . ...

... 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 ...