... 2010 February 16 . Dark Shuttle Approaching . Credit: Expedition 22 Crew, NASA . ... Astronauts on board the International Space Station first saw it far in the distance. ... Finally, at just past 11 pm ( CST ) last Tuesday, the object, revealed to be the Space Shuttle Endeavour , docked as expected with the Earth-orbiting space station. Pictured above , Endeavour was imaged near Earth's horizon as it approached, where several layers of the Earth's atmosphere were visible. ... About APOD | ...

... Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2000 February 28 . The Sombrero Galaxy from VLT . ... FORS1 , VLT ANTU , ESO . ... Reasons include the Sombrero 's unusually large and extended central bulge of stars, and dark prominent dust lanes that appear in a disk that we see nearly edge-on. Billions of old stars cause the diffuse glow of the extended central bulge. ... About APOD | ...

Astronomy Picture of the Day . ... Credit Copyright: Cassini Imaging Team , SSI , JPL , ESA , NASA Explanation: Normally hidden by a thick, hazy atmosphere, tantalizing features on Titan's surface appear in this false-color view . The image was recorded as the Cassini spacecraft approached its first close flyby of Saturn's smog-shrouded moon on October 26. ... Publications with keywords: Titan - Saturn - cassini spacecraft . Publications with words: Titan - Saturn - cassini spacecraft . ...

... 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. ...

Astronotes Armagh Planetarium's Stellar Blog! ... Comets and Asteroids . ... Space Flight . ... Earth Satellites . ... By admin February 19, 2011 Posted in: Comets and Asteroids . ... Since it was launched in 1999, the Stardust spacecraft has travelled about 5.7 billion km (3.5 billion miles) on its odyssey from Earth to comet Wild 2, back to Earth then on to comet Tempel 1. ... Here you will find the latest news and views from the fascinating worlds of astronomy and space exploration. ...

... Comet Ikeya-Zhang, designated C/2002 C1 (Ikeya-Zhang), is named after Kaoru Ikeya of Shizuoka prefecture, Japan, and Daqing Zhang of Henan province, China, who independently discovered it on the night of 1 February 2002. A preliminary orbit reported the following day indicated that it would come moderately close to both the Earth and the Sun and that it might become visible to the naked eye during late March and April 2002. ... Bailey, M.E., Clube, S.V.M. and Napier, W.M. The Origin of Comets . ...

... The photometric accuracy of the data is often limited by the quality of the flatfield used to calibrate the data (see "Determining the "Best" Reference Files" on page 45-14 as well as the WWW Reference File and Closure Flat Memos). ... Large gradients caused by F122M. Due to the Earth's albedo, some broadband filters had to be taken in conjunction with a neutral density filter (either F8ND or F122M) to obtain sufficient numbers of unsaturated earthflat observations for creating reference files. ...

... Tonight's Sky . ... Sky this Month . ... Star Atlas . ... stars . ... The Sky This Week: April 1 - 10 . ... Observing springtime deep-sky objects with a large telescope . ... Why do some stars appear to flash a variety of different colors when you look at them through a telescope? ... So, Earthт??s atmosphere will bend some colors from especially bright stars more so than others, which makes the source look like itт??s flashing colors. Get instant access to subscriber content on Astronomy.com! ...

... The remote planet Pluto and its moon Charon orbit the Sun at a mean distance of almost 6,000 million kilometres, or nearly fourty times farther out than the Earth. During a recent investigation by an international group of astronomers [1], the best picture ever of Pluto and Charon [2] was secured with the European Space Agency's Faint Object Camera at the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). ... The new HST image was taken when Charon was near its maximum elongation from Pluto (0.9 arcseconds). ...

Mercury magazine is now digital only, with all of the same articles and features that appeared in the print version. The magazine will be formatted to download and include space for advertising. Our readers are directly involved in the mainstream of astronomy research and education. ... 86% are involved in astronomy education at some level . ... 1/4 page . ... Additional work includes resizing of ad material, reformatting or correcting electronic files and correction of advertiser errors. ...

ESO PR 06/96; 16 February 1996 . ... In the early morning of January 31, 1996, Japanese amateur astronomer Yuji Hyakutake made his second comet discovery within five weeks. ... Information about some earlier comet encounters may be found in the Appendix at the end of this Press Release. ... By a straightforward extrapolation of the current brightness, it would appear that Comet Hyakutake will reach magnitude 1 on March 25, 1996, at the time of the closest approach to the Earth. ...