... Editor's choices for the most educational Astronomy Pictures of the Day about spiral galaxies: . APOD: 2003 March 10 - M101: The Pinwheel Galaxy . Explanation: Why do many galaxies appear as spirals ? ... One result is that M101 , also called the Pinwheel Galaxy , has several extremely bright star-forming regions (called HII regions ) spread across its spiral arms. ... APOD: 2003 April 13 - NGC 1365: A Nearby Barred Spiral Galaxy . ... NGC 1365 is a member of the Fornax Cluster of Galaxies . ...

... The Fornax Cluster of Galaxies . ... Blasted out by energetic massive star formation the bullets, relatively dense, hot gas clouds about ten times the size of Pluto's orbit, are blue in the false color image. ... Drifting near bright star Eta Geminorum, at the foot of a celestial twin, the Jellyfish Nebula is seen dangling tentacles from the bright arcing ridge of emission left of center. ... Open Star Clusters M35 and NGC 2158 . ... Bright blue stars frequently distinguish younger open clusters. ...

... 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. ...

... Kalirai and Harvey Richer of the University of British Columbia led the study, which began as an investigation of a globular star cluster in the Milky Way galaxy known as NGC 6397. ... Within the population of stars and galaxies behind NGC 6397, the Hubble image revealed a large elliptical galaxy that contains several hundred globular clusters. ... In fact, a single giant star in NGC 6397 appears 10 million times brighter than one of the distant globular clusters. ...

... Planets . ... Earth Satellites . ... Looking in the direction of the constellation Cygnus the Swan and launched by NASA in 2009 is the Kepler Space Observatory.Many previous missions searching for exoplanets mainly detected large giant planets, like large hot Jupiters (it is easier to detect larger planets).However KeplerтАЩs main objective is to search for much smaller planets located in a habitable zone which is not too close nor too far from their star; planets which may be just like our Earth. ...

... STScI-PRC97-25 HUBBLE ASTRONOMERS USE LENS IN NATURE TO UNCOVER MOST DISTANT GALAXY IN THE UNIVERSE [LEFT] A NASA Hubble Space Telescope image of the galaxy cluster CL1358+62 has uncovered a gravitationally-lensed image of a more distant galaxy located far beyond the cluster. The gravitationally-lensed image appears as a red crescent to the lower right of center. ... The image was taken with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera-2 on January 13, 1996. ...

... We have made observations of the Perseus cluster with the Westerbork Telescope at 610 MHz. ... Several newly detected sources are identified with cluster galaxies. ... No evidence is found for the existence of the previously reported ~ 65'x25' cluster halo, 3C 84B. Key words: radio galaxies - clusters - tailed radio sources buoyancy The Perseus Cluster of galaxies is one of the most fascinating systems accessible to extragalactic astronomers. ...

... Neutral and Ionised Hydrogen in NGC 4214 V. J. McIntyre1,2 1 2 Physics Department, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW 2522, Australia Astrophysics Department, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia vjm@physics.usyd.edu.au Abstract: It is not clear at present how the diffuse ionised gas (DIG) component in galaxies is ionised. ... How porous the ISM must be depends on the (unknown) location of the ionised emission relative to the disk. ... 1996). ... Local H I surface density is 2в1021 cm-3 ...

In autumn 1994, two groups of astronomers announced that they had discovered Cepheid variable stars in a distant cluster of galaxies. ... As the term suggests, variable stars change in brightness over time. ... Variable stars are an ideal way to get high-school students doing real science, with real data, from the real sky. ... a sky chart to find the stars . ... Students can use the nearby stars to estimate the magnitude of Delta. ... Locate the star Delta in Cepheus and estimate its brightness . ...

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 . ...

Astronomers have discovered a massive cluster of young galaxies forming in the distant universe. The growing galactic metropolis, named COSMOS-AzTEC3, is the most distant known massive "proto-cluster" of galaxies, lying about 12.6 billion light-years from Earth. ... The other dots in this picture are stars or galaxies that are not members of the cluster тАФ most of them are located closer to us than the cluster, but some are farther away. The two brightest spots are 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. ...

... 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 ...

... BLUE STRAGGLER STARS are unusually hot and bright stars found in the cores of ancient star clusters known as globulars. ... BACKGROUND (from wikipedia): Blue straggler stars are stars in open or globular clusters that are hotter and bluer than other cluster stars having the same luminosity. ... There is evidence in favor of this view, notably that blue straggler stars appear to be much more common in dense regions of clusters, especially in the cores of globular clusters. ...

... 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. ...

. F IGURE . 2. The distribution of globular clusters projected onto the XY [(a) and (c)] and YZ [(b) and (d)] planes for metal-rich clusters of the thick disk with [Fe/H] -1.0 [(a) and (b)] and metal-poor clusters of the halo [(c) and (d)]. The closed curves are upper envelopes drawn by eye. Clusters lying far from the central concentrations in the diagrams are outlined and their numbers indicated. discussion in the text | previous figure | next figure .

... Science User Portal . ... ESO, the European Southern Observatory . ... Travel and Contacts . Travel to ESO Headquarters . ... ESO . ... Survey Telescopes . ... Galaxy Clusters . ... Star Clusters . ... Stars@ESO . ... ESO Science Newsletter . ... View shopping cart . ... This close-up video pan sequence gives a detailed look at a new image of the star cluster Messier 47 taken using the Wide Field Imager camera, installed on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESOтАЩs La Silla Observatory in Chile. ...

... Armagh Observatory, College Hill, Armagh BT61 9DG, +44 (0)28 3752 2928 . See also images taken on November 22nd . Image taken by Andy McCrea who says, . To me the comet appears yellowish and it has gone from star-like to a . ... More images from Andy McCrea here . ... The true explanation is that a very faint comet, known as periodic comet Holmes, produced a massive outburst of material and became a million times brighter than it was just a day earlier. ... More images from Andy McCrea . ...

ATMoB "Open Cluster Observing Award " Guidelines Purpose: To promote observing among the membership of the Amateur Telescope Makers of Boston through participation in the Open Clusters Observing Awards program. Introduction: This awards program is oriented towards visually observing open clusters above magnitude 9.9. ... It turns out that a very unprejudiced and convenient method to dermine the limiting magnitude is to count the number of visible stars in certain areas on the sky. ...

This page is devoted to information on Supernova 1999gi in NGC 3184 . ... Information on the original web pages for many of these images can be found on the Supernova links web page. ... NGC 3184 is a fairly close Mag 10.3 galaxy, only about half as distant as the Virgo cluster. ... Seiichi Yoshida has a 1999gi page . Odd Trondal's 1999gi page . ... CfA image . ... 14.5 . ... Jean Marie Llapasset image . ... vsnet-alert 3805 ] SN 1999gi in NGC 3184 . vsnet-chat 2438 ] Host galaxy of SN1999gi . ...