... Cat s Eye . ... A classic planetary nebula, the Cat's Eye (NGC 6543) represents a final, brief yet glorious phase in the life of a sun-like star. ... These three bright nebulae are often featured in telescopic tours of the constellation Sagittarius and the view toward the center of our Milky Way galaxy. ... Molecular Torus Surrounds Black Hole . ... A Supernova in Nearby Galaxy NGC 2403 . ... C153 Takes the Plunge . ... Hurricane Frances Approaches Florida . ...

Today's APOD | ... Editor's choices for the most educational Astronomy Pictures of the Day about emission nebulae: . ... Explanation: Clouds of glowing hydrogen gas mingle ominously with dark dust lanes in this close-up of IC 1396 , an active star forming region some 2,000 light years away in the constellation Cepheus. ... APOD: 2003 October 22 - The Heart and Soul Nebulas . ... The magnificent emission region, the Orion Nebula (aka M42), lies at the upper right of the picture. ... Index | ...

Astronotes Armagh Planetarium's Stellar Blog! ... Armagh Planetarium . ... Stars . ... Space Flight . ... Monthly Sky Notes . ... NGC 6357's inner star forming region glows with the emission of ionized hydrogen gas. Image credit: ESO/VVV Survey/D. Minniti. ... Located around 8000 light years away in the constellation of Scorpius , NGC 6357 (sometimes called the Lobster Nebula ) is a typical stellar nursery, filled with vast clouds of gas and tendrils of dark dust. ... Subscribe to Astronotes . ...

... Tonight's Sky . ... The Magazine . ... Observing . ... The double star 54 Leonis, spiral galaxy NGC 3198, and emission nebula NGC 3199 . ... Astronomy for Kids . ... Observing springtime deep-sky objects with a large telescope . ... Bright planets meet at dusk . ... Astronomy magazine subscribers can read the full article for free. ... Get instant access to subscriber content on Astronomy.com! ... Receive news, sky-event information, observing tips, and more from Astronomy's weekly email newsletter....

... Would you say the space between your eyes and your hand is empty? ... This means it s completely empty, without a single particle of gas or speck of dust. ... However, while much of the Universe is a vacuum, there are patches which aren t. These are places where cosmic gas and dust that floats between the stars in a galaxy. ... But ISM material clumps together over time forming larger, heavier blobs of gas and dust until they make a big cloud in space, like the one in this photograph. ...

... STScI-PRC00-36 GHOSTLY REFLECTIONS IN THE PLEIADES NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has caught the eerie, wispy tendrils of a dark interstellar cloud being destroyed by the passage of one of the brightest stars in the Pleiades star cluster. ... In 1890, American astronomer E. E. Barnard, observing visually with the Lick Observatory 36-inch telescope in California, discovered an exceptionally bright nebulosity adjacent to the bright Pleiades star Merope. ...

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. ...

... 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 . ...

... The Sun . Does anyone know how many stars are there in the solar system? Come take a look at the Sun. See that? ... Did you know all the stars you see when you look up are inside our galaxy! ... Did you know that our Sun and solar system were born in a cloud of gas and dust like this. ... We're looking at a place where stars are being born. ... Sharing the Universe is based upon work supported by the Informal Education Division of the National Science Foundation under Grant no DRL-0638873. ...

... Bad Astronomy . ... Bitesize Astronomy . ... Keep Bad Astronomy close to your heart, and help make me filthy rich. ... When Venus is on the far side of the Sun, we see the entire near side lit by the Sun. ... When it is on the near side of the Sun, it shows a beautiful thin crescent, because it is between us and the Sun and we see the mostly unlit dark half. ... To see this for yourself, draw a circle one centimeter across, then, next to it, draw a circle 6 centimeters across. ... 2008 Phil Plait. ...

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 | ...

... 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) ...

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 . ...

The recent discovery that the ultraviolet (UV) dust extinction in starburst galaxies is similar to that found in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) motivated us to reinvestigate the UV extinction found in the SMC. We have been able to improve significantly on previous studies by carefully choosing pairs of well-matched reddened and unreddened stars. ... Thus, the behavior of the dust extinction in the SMC supports a dependence of dust properties on star formation activity. ... ADS Citation Query . ...

... Archives . ... Jun 13th, 2007| 08:41 am | ... I don?t know why astro-ph thought this article on the statistics of football dynamics (Mendes, Malacarne, Anteneodo 2007; physics/0706.1758 ) was relevant to me and emailed the abstract, but I?m glad they did, because they deal with a question I have wrestled with for a long time: how to figure out the underlying distribution that controls a stochastic process. ... Comment ( RSS ) | ... Chandra Blog . ... Entries (RSS) and Comments (RSS) . ...

Next: Strongly Interacting Galaxies Up: The Group of Nearby Previous: NGC 7552 . is a barred spiral which is interacting with several bright neighbours, namely NGC 7590, NGC 7599 (see Fig. 12), and most likely also NGC 7552 (see above). ... Figure: H I distribution (contours) of NGC 7582 and two nearby galaxies, NGC 7590 ( = 1596 kms -1 ) and NGC 7599 ( = 1654 kms -1 ) overlaid onto the optical emission (greyscale) from the Digitized Sky Survey (DSS). ...

... Invisible airwaves crackle with life Bright antenna bristle with the energy Emotional feedback on timeless wavelength Bearing a gift beyond price, almost free All this machinery making modern music Can still be open-hearted. ... You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice. ... SONG: Different Strings Who's come to slay the dragon, Come to watch him fall? ... Tide Pools When the ebbing tide retreats Along the rocky shoreline, It leaves a trail of tidal pools In a short-lived galaxy. ...

... Our Sun is part of a huge wheel-shaped collection of stars. ... Astronomers have long suspected it was a very massive black hole, and that every galaxy had such a central mass, created early in the history of the universe. ... However, unless that object happens to be headed directly at the black hole (a relatively small target) it will just swing around and fly away again, like a comet making a pass at the Sun. The velocity acquired in falling towards the black hole also helps it escape. ...

... I t was long thought that Titan was the largest satellite in the solar system but recent observations have shown that Titan's atmosphere is so thick that its solid surface is slightly smaller than Ganymede's . ... R ecent observations with the Hubble Space Telescope show remarkable near infrared views of Titan's surface (right and top). ... T he observations by HST also indicate that Titan's rotation is in fact synchronous like most of Saturn's other moons. more images . ... Saturn .. ...

Next: Catalog Construction Up: Observations and Analysis Previous: Source Detections . ... It was assumed that the highest signal gives the most likely position of the source. ... Comparing the summed map with the maps from the individual energy ranges, the one which produced the smallest error box was chosen to represent the source position, as long as was greater than 4, a level chosen to reflect a reasonable degree of confidence in the detection. ...