... February 5, 1997 . Running Red Rings Around Jupiter . ... Explanation : Jupiter has rings, too. Unlike Saturn's bright rings which are composed of chunks of ice, Jupiter's rings are darker and appear to consist of fine particles of rock. ... Quite visible are Jupiter's rings , bands and spots in the outer atmosphere . ... The origin of Jupiter's rings remains unknown , although hypothesized to be created by material scattered from meteorite impacts onto Jupiter's moons . ... About APOD > . ...

... The Spectrum of A Meteor . ... Chasing the brief flash of a meteor trail across the sky with a very large telescope is a nearly impossible task. But on May 12, 2002, astronomers got lucky, as a bright meteor chanced across the narrow slit of their spectrograph at the Paranal Observatory. A Perseid Meteor . ... In dark, moonless, predawn skies you may see dozens of meteors per hour. ... Connecting the Pipe Nebula to the bright star Antares is a flowing dark cloud nicknamed the Dark River. ...

... September 5, 1998 . The Pulsar Powered Crab . Credit: J. Hester and P. Scowen ( ASU ), NASA . ... Using a stunning series of visible light images taken with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) , astronomers have discovered spectacular pulsar powered motions within the Crab nebula. Highlights of this HST Crab "movie" show wisps of material moving away from the pulsar at half the speed of light, a scintillating halo, and an intense knot of emission dancing, sprite-like, above the pulsar's pole. ...

... Happy Birthday to the Very Large Telescope! To celebrate, the telescope has been used to take this space photograph of a party in space. ... What this picture actually shows is a spectacular cloud of gas and dust that astronomers call a stellar nursery. That s because deep inside this pretty pink cloud, new stars are flaring into life. ... Silhouetted against the glowing pink gas are clouds which look like balloons : even thicker clumps of dust, known as Thackery's globules. ...

Astronotes Armagh Planetarium's Stellar Blog! ... Solar System . ... Moon . ... Comets and Asteroids . ... What changed our view of Chariklo is the discovery of a ring system around it, the first such feature found around a Solar System body smaller than a gas giant planet. ... Almost certainly the rings were born when a collision with a smaller asteroid blasted millions of tonnes of debris off CharikloтАЩs surface. ... A ring system detected around the Centaur (10199) Chariklo (Braga-Rigas et al.) ...