Astronomy Picture of the Day . ... The Hydra Cluster of Galaxies . ... White Oval Clouds on Jupiter . ... What are those white ovals all over Jupiter? ... The above pictured white ovals are located near the Great Red Spot, and have persisted on Jupiter since the 1930s. The Great Red Spot has persisted for at least 300 years. Jupiter's Ring Halo . ... Why do many galaxies appear as spirals? ... The above pictures taken by Mars Pathfinder highlight how clouds vary during the end of a Martian day. ...

... 2012 April 17 . Antares and Clouds . ... Explanation: Antares is a huge star. In a class called red supergiant, Antares is about 850 times the diameter of our own Sun, 15 times more massive, and 10,000 times brighter. Antares is the brightest star in the constellation of Scorpius and one of the brighter stars in all the night sky. ... Far behind Antares , to the lower right in the above image , is the globular star cloud M4 , while the bright star on the far right is Al Niyat . ...

Astronotes Armagh Planetarium's Stellar Blog! ... Armagh Planetarium . ... Solar System . ... Comets and Asteroids . ... Stars . ... Space Flight . ... By admin September 22, 2010 Posted in: Comets and Asteroids , Stars . ... At first glance Gliese 710 is not a very distinguished star. ... The rogue star may come as close as a light year to us, blundering through the Oort Cloud. ... Observers in the inner Solar System will see perhaps thousands of comets bloom. ... Subscribe to Astronotes . ...

... The Large Magellanic Cloud is a Dwarf Irregular galaxy in orbit around our own Milky Way. It is a large object, several degrees in size, and easily visible to the unaided eye in Southern Hemisphere skies. The LMC is located in the constellation of Doradus at about 5h30m Right Ascension, -68 degrees Declination, and lies at a distance of roughly 50 kiloparsecs (160,000 light years) from Earth. ...

... no comet has been observed with an orbit that indicates that it came from interstellar space, . ... From this he proposed that comets reside in a vast cloud at the outer reaches of the solar system. ... Unfortunately, since the individual comets are so small and at such large distances, we have no direct evidence about the Oort Cloud. ... T he Kuiper Belt is a disk-shaped region past the orbit of Neptune roughly 30 to 100 AU from the Sun containing many small icy bodies. ... Small Bodies .. ...

... 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 . ...

The 1000 Brightest HIPASS Galaxies: HI Properties . ... These belong to 91 new sources for which no optical or infrared counterparts have previously been cataloged, an additional 51 galaxies for which no redshifts were previously known, and 16 galaxies for which the cataloged optical velocities disagree. ... J0001-15, ( ps eps , jpg ) J0035-25, ( ps eps , jpg ) J0105-06, ( ps eps , jpg ) J0221-20, ( ps eps , jpg ) . ... The 1000 Brightest HIPASS Galaxies: Newly Cataloged Galaxies . ...

... 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. ...

True Color Image Gallery: Galactic SNR | Magellanic Cloud SNR . ... Chandra Proposer's Guide pile up section ] During frame readout, the ACIS CCDs take 40 microsec to (parallel) transfer the charge by one pixel. As a result of this, each frame readout, each pixel is exposed for 40 microsec to a source (plus cosmic X-ray background) at each location along its column. ... Note also that the image does not just trail, it extends along the whole column. ... Chandra Supernova Remnant Catalog . ...

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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 | ...

... It's a Meteor Shower Smaller than grains of sand, meteors vaporize in a bright streak of light as they hit Earth's atmosphere. Meteor showers come from comets, but the sporadic meteors on other nights are mostly asteroid bits. ... Meteor Showers Come From Comets Jupiter Earth Sun Comet Mercury Tips: A bright Moon can wash out meteors, making them hard to see. ... But the comet bits hit Earth's atmosphere so fast, the pieces vaporize in bright streaks -- making a meteor shower! ...

... 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. ...

The Humble Heart Whence comes this bright celestial light, What cause produces this? ... O Lord Jehova art Thou here? ... Of all the trees among the wood I've chose the little vine; The meek and low are nigh to me, The humble heart is mine." ... I've chosen me a pleasant grove And set my lovely vine Here in my vinyard I will rove, The humble heart is mine. Of all the kinds that range at large, I've chose one little flock, And those I make my lovely charge, Before them I will walk. ...

The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope has captured a detailed view of a star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud тАФ one of the Milky Way's satellite galaxies. ... NGC 2014 (right) is irregularly shaped and red and its neighbour, NGC 2020, is round and blue. These odd and very different forms were both sculpted by powerful stellar winds from extremely hot newborn stars that also radiate into the gas, causing it to glow brightly. ...

... Operating at a wavelength of 10 ?m, it produces a 135њx135њ image with a resolution of 0.9њ. ... The clouds move from the west-southwest. ... At the same time as the IR images, visible light images were taken with an Apple Computer QuickTake electronic camera. ... At 1540 MDT, the large central cloud is visible in both images. At 1544 MDT, a distinctive cloud is apparent near the center in the visible image and right of center in the IR. The performance of the SDSS cloud scanner is excellent. ...

Supernova 1987A in LMC . One day in 1987, an astronomer by the name of Ian Shelton was making observations of the Tarantula Nebula in Large Magellanic cloud at Las Campanas Observatory, and he noticed something strange on his image. ... SN 1987A got as bright as 2.7, the only other recent SN even to come close was 1885A in M31 which got up to mag 6. ... Mag 4.5 . ... IAUC 4318 2/25/87 Type II? ... IAUC 7354 2/1/00 New structure in the inner ring . ... IAUC 7360 2/7/00 HST observation of new spot . ...

Supernovae are simply stars which explode. ... To understand supernovae, we need to understand stars. ... In this stage our Sun will swell up hundreds of times its current size, swallowing the Earth, and glowing hundreds of times brighter than it is now. ... Stars more than 10 times the mass of our sun have much more exciting lives. ... A Type II supernova to be precise. ... Since 1995 two teams have been discovering these objects: Our team, the High-Z SN Search, and the Supernova Cosmology Project. ...

... The Galactic low-mass X-ray binary GS 2023+338 was discovered during the burst on May 22, 1989 with the Japanise satellite Ginga (aka Galaxy). The flux reached 17 crabs (this unit of flux measurement is an bright X-ray source, Crab Nebula) at 10-35 keV. ... No other radio telescope worldwide carried out multi-frequency measurements. ... Upon 14 days the radio flux fell below the detection level at the RATAN-600 in relation to the decrease of the X-ray flux. ...

... NGC 1530 is one of the largest barred spiral galaxies in the northern sky, with bright CO emission. ... To trace molecular gas, we observed the line, with the IRAM Interferometer. ... Properties of NGC 1530 and observational results . ... Then in a frame rotating with the potential, the periodic orbits are ellipses either parallel to the bar ( ) or perpendicular ( ), depending on the radius of the orbit. ... We observed the molecular gas in the bar of NGC 1530, a barred SBb spiral in the line. ...