... 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. ...

Astronomy Picture of the Day . ... Bright Stars, Dim Galaxy . ... These two clusters of bright, newly formed stars surrounded by a glowing nebula lie 10 million light-years away in the dim, irregular galaxy cataloged as NGC 2366. ... What makes the core of galaxy MCG-6-30-15 so bright? ... These dramatic stellar explosions that destroy stars and disperse elements that compose people and planets are not so well understood that astronomers can accurately predict when a star will explode - yet. ...

... 2013 November 18 . Aurora and Unusual Clouds Over Iceland . ... On the far left, bright green auroras appear to emanate from the glacier as if it was a volcano . ... On the far right is a long and unusual lenticular cloud tinged with green light emitted from another aurora well behind it. Just above this lenticular cloud are unusual iridescent lenticular clouds displaying a broad spectral range of colors. ... Happy Holidays: Free APOD 2014 Calendar in PDF format . ... About APOD | ...

Armagh, 2nd May 2002. Saturn and Mars are at the top left, Venus is the very bright object and Mercury appears through the clouds. ... All five planets visible to ancient astronomers can now be seen in alignment in the western sky. ... Next is Venus, the brightest planet or "Evening Star", followed by Mars, a much fainter red planet, then Saturn (near the red star Aldebaran, the brightest star in Taurus), and finally, slightly higher in the sky, the largest planet Jupiter. ...

... STScI-PRC95-02 HUBBLE VIEWS A STARRY RING WORLD BORN IN A HEAD-ON COLLISION [Right] - A rare and spectacular head-on collision between two galaxies appears in this NASA Hubble Space Telescope true-color image of the Cartwheel Galaxy, located 500 million light-years away in the constellation Sculptor. The new details of star birth resolved by Hubble provide an opportunity to study how extremely massive stars are born in large fragmented gas clouds. ...

Astronotes Armagh Planetarium's Stellar Blog! ... Space Flight . ... Earth Satellites . ... Leonid meteors seen from 13 km altitude aboard an aircraft during the 1999 Leonids Multi-Instrument Aircraft Campaign (Leonid-MAC). Comet Tempel-Tuttle provides the cometary debris for the Leonid meteor shower. ... Every 17-19 November Earth crosses Tempel-TuttleтАЩs orbit and the Leonids become visible. With clear, dark skies observers may see 10 to 15 Leonid meteors every hour on those mornings. ...

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 . ...

... The awsome spectacle of a brilliant comet, with its long ghostly tail streaming behind it, is a rare event. ... Only one other comet, Comet Halley, was seen so far from the Sun, giving scientists an opportunity to watch it as it slowly warmed up and sprouted a tail. ... Comets are the Rip Van Winkles of the solar system -- mini-worlds that have changed little during their 4.5-billion-year nap far from the Sun. ... Observing Comets . ... Once, comets inhabited the entire solar system. ...

... This beautiful new image shows a glowing cloud of cosmic dust sitting boldly against a backdrop of shining stars. To the naked eye, thick clouds like these appear empty and dark, but some are actually home to the brightest nebulae and hottest young stars in the Universe! Stars are made of gas, so it is no surprise that they are born inside thick, gassy clouds. But the clouds that give birth to stars also block our view of them growing within. ...

With the Phase I CGPS now complete at 21cm, we are in a position to examine the population of cold H I clouds over the entire range of the survey. Current methods of H I self-absorption (HISA) identification and analysis allow us to explore the properties and distribution of the portion of cold H I which appears as HISA shadows in the 21cm line data. Such studies are necessarily biased toward clouds with bright background emission. ...

The red colors in this image show the galaxy M66 as it appears at the submillimeter wavelength of 850 microns, while the white background shows the galaxy as it appears in visible light. Regions of cold dust that appear as dark streaks in the white image glow brightly in the red image. ...

EMBARGOED UNTIL: 9:20 AM CST, January 6, 1999 CONTACT: John Biretta Space Telecsope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD (Phone: (410) 338-4917; Internet: biretta@stsci.edu) HUBBLE DETECTS FASTER-THAN-LIGHT MOTION IN GALAXY M87 Astronomers reported today discovering clouds which appear to move many times faster than the speed of light, shooting out from the region of a black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy. ... It's an illusion created by the finite speed of light and rapid motion," Biretta said. ...

A team of U.S. and German astrophysicists have made the first ever detection of X-rays coming from a comet. ... Following the initial detection, the team reported repeated X-ray emissions from the comet over the next 24 hours. ... One preliminary theory is that X-ray emission from the Sun was absorbed by a cloud of gaseous water molecules surrounding the nucleus of the comet, and then were re-emitted by the molecules in a process physicists call "fluorescence." ... Comets . ...

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. ...

... Submitted by Joseph Kristl on 01/22/2007 11:11:43 . ... 16:54:59 local 1/100 sec, f/5.6, ISO 400, fl = 400 mm . While Venus appeared somewhat brighter, it was much higher and thus in a considerably darker sky (and not through thin clouds). My impression at the time was that the comet was brighter than Venus (using calibrated eyeballs.. ... Copyright (c) Amateur Telescope Makers of Boston, Inc. ...

... 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. ...

Supernovae 2010jl in UGC 5189A . This page is devoted to information on Supernova 2010jl in UGC 5189A . ... Astronomy Magazine's Supernova SN 2010jl . ... Bad Astronomy's SN 2010 JL in weird UGC 5189 . SpaceBanter.com 2010jl post . Blogbaker's 2010jl post . Joseph Brimacombe widefield color image . ... 2010/11/04.50 . ... 2010/11/05.203 . ... Joseph Brimacombe . 2010/11/05.467 . ... mirror . ... JM Llapasset . ... 2011/01/15.160 . ... Back to Bright Supernovae - 2010 . ...

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 . ...

... This program was created for correlating chosen regions in the series of fts images. ... Chosen regions' . ... In this section the program counts the integral for each region of the grid for each image. ... As a matter of fact, the integral is total brightness of the region and it is counted by 'int_tabulated' IDL function. ... In addition, the program will show the count of the regions which correlate with the corresponding region (the brighter region means the bigger count) and its contour. ...

... Energy . ... Solar Wind . ... Field . ... The Sun is our nearest star and the source of energy for life on Earth. ... For centuries astronomers wondered whether they were clouds floating in the Sun's atmosphere, but we now know that they really are huge regions of magnetic field, about as intense as the field at the poles of an iron magnet. For some reason the field slows down the flow of heat from the Sun's interior and keeps sunspots slightly cooler than their surroundings. ... Solar Eclipses . ...