... 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. ...

... Comet Ikeya-Zhang has become bright enough to stand out in the night sky. ... The comet appears.. ... Known to some as the Elephant's Trunk Nebula, parts of gas and dust clouds of this star formation region may appear to take on foreboding forms, some nearly human. ... This image from the Hubble Space Telescope reveals the Cat's Eye Nebula to be one of the most complex planetary nebulae known. ... In the heart of the Rosette Nebula lies a bright open cluster of stars that lights up the nebula. ...

November 2006 Astronotes 1 Candles in the Dark Image Credit: Wikipedia.org By Colin Johnston, Science Communicator Since the mid-ninteenth century astronomers have used the principle of parallax to measure the distance to other stars. ... How then can we tell, for example, that M31, the galaxy in Andromeda, is 2.2 million light years away? It would be straight-forward to tell how far away a star was if it was exactly the same brightness as our own Sun. ...

Galaxies are diffuse objects which are imaged against a background of finite brightness and noise. Galaxies which have the maximum contrast with respect to this background are the ones that are first discovered. ... These galaxies have been missed to date but active surveys for them are underway. ... In this page we present several examples of these newly discovered Low Surface Brightness galaxies as well as examples of high surface brightness galaxies. ...

... To be read in conjunction with Section 4.11 of the WFPC2 Instrument Handbook , -Version 4.0. ... 1 The second study found evidence that CTE loss for faint stars has increased with time (Whitmore, 1998). The primary observational consequence of CTE loss is that a point source at the top of the chip appears to be fainter than if observed at the bottom of the chip, due to the loss of electrons as the star is read out down the chip (see Figure 1 ). ... Last updated: 06/16/98 10:38:00 . ...

... SEARCH ASP SITE: Match ALL words Match ANY word . ... ASP Conference Series . ... Accidental Astrophysics: The Devil's In the Magnitudes, Part II . ... The star second to the Sun in brilliance is Sirius. ... Recall the magnitude system, passed down to us through a hundred generations of sky watchers, as a means of quantifying stellar brightness ("Accidental Astrophysics," May/June, p. 9). ... Yes, it is a magnitude difference, but that difference is due to the distance between us and the star. ...

... STScI-PRC98-11A STARING INTO THE WINDS OF DESTRUCTION: HST/NICMOS IMAGES OF THE PLANETARY NEBULA NGC 7027 The Hubble Space Telescope's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) has captured a glimpse of a brief stage in the burnout of NGC 7027, a medium-mass star like our sun. ... The material settles into a wind of gas and dust blowing away from the dying star. ... During this phase, intense ultraviolet radiation from the central star lights up a region of gas surrounding it. ...

... The HH flow associated with young stellar object HL Tau has an exciting history and even until now the origin of some its features is not clear yet. ... Knotty structures of Herbig-Haro jets are common phenomena and knowing the origin of such structures is essential for understanding the processes of jet formation. ... In the flow detected compact knots with high (-150 km/s) and bow shape structures in front of those, with low radial velocities (