... Explanation: A familiar, zigzag, W pattern in northern constellation Cassiopeia is traced by five bright stars in this colorful and broad mosaic. ... The yellowish giant star is cooler than the Sun, over 40 times the solar diameter, and so luminous it shines brightly in Earth's night from 230 light-years away. ... But from their perspective a mere 4.3 light-years away they would see our Sun as a sixth bright star in Cassiopeia, extending the zigzag pattern just beyond the left edge of this frame. ...

... 2016 March 18 . The W in Cassiopeia . ... Explanation: A familiar, zigzag, W pattern in northern constellation Cassiopeia is traced by five bright stars in this colorful and broad mosaic. ... The yellowish giant star is cooler than the Sun, over 40 times the solar diameter, and so luminous it shines brightly in Earth's night from 230 light-years away. ... Of course, night skygazers in the Alpha Centauri star system would also see the recognizable outline traced by Cassiopeia's bright stars. ...

... The distances between stars are so immense that we can't use miles or kilometres to measure them, the numbers would become too large. For example, the closest star to our Solar System, is a whopping 38,000,000,000,000 kilometres away! And that's the closest star. ... And this cloud is inside one of the Milky Way s closest neighbours, a nearby galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud. ... The colourful clouds of gas and dust are filled with hot new-born stars which make these clouds glow. ...

Twas noontide of summer, And midtime of night, And stars, in their orbits, Shone pale, through the light Of the brighter, cold moon. ... I gazed awhile On her cold smile; Too cold---too cold for me--- There passed, as a shroud, A fleecy cloud, And I turned away to thee, Proud Evening Star, In thy glory afar And dearer thy beam shall be; For joy to my heart Is the proud part Thou bearest in Heaven at night, And more I admire Thy distant fire, Than that colder, lowly light. ...

Astronotes Armagh Planetarium's Stellar Blog! ... Moon . ... Stars . ... Space Flight . ... Monthly Sky Notes . ... June . ... NASA has been studying NCLтАЩs for some time and are trying to determine if there is a relationship between climate change and these wonders of the night sky. ... Spica and Saturn actually form a triangle with the bright orangish star Arcturus which is higher in the sky. ... The ancient Greeks saw the stars of Libra as part of Scorpius, specifically the scorpionтАЩs claws. ...

... This is timed to coincide with National Astronomy Week, 23 - 30 August, when Mars is at its closest for 60,000 years, and Beagle-2 and two other NASA spacecraft are on their way to Mars. (there may have been problems with transmission of my last email, so I include the contents below - if you have already got it, disregard the rest of this: ((As promised in STARDUST, I said I would hold a 'Perseids BBQ' for IAA members ( others) on the first clear night of 9, 10, 11 or 12 August. ...

Song: I Ran Artist: Flock of Seagulls I walk along the avenue i never thought I'd meet a girl like you with all that hair and tormy eyes the kind of eyes that hypnotize me through and I ran I ran so far away I just ran , I ran all night and day I couldn't get away a cloud appears above your head a beam of light comes shining down on you the ...

... Fit the ring around the equator and then change its inclination from 0 degrees (equatorial orbit used by geosynchronous satellites) to 28.5 degrees (space shuttle orbit) to 51.6 degrees (space station orbit) to 90 degrees (polar orbit used by spy satellites). by Rob Landis, Space Telescope Science Institute . ... With so many satellites now in orbit, it is likely that you have seen an artificial satellite zipping across the night sky. ... http://www.amsat.org/amsat/ftpsoft.html . ...

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. ...

... Archives . ... Differential Emission Measure [Eqn] . ... Astro 301, class 1, and it took all of 20 minutes of talk about stellar magnitudes to put that notion to permanent rest. ... Now, it turns out that the human eye perceives brightness on a log scale, so magnitudes are numerically similar to log (brightness). ... frac{5}{2}\log_{10}\left(\frac{f_{object}}{f_{standard}}\right) \,,$$ . ... frac{5}{2}\log_{10}\left(\frac{L_{object}}{4 \pi d^2}\frac{1}{f_{standard}}\right) \,.$ ... Chandra Blog . ...

The GSFC acousto-optic tunable filter (AOTF) camera was used at the Apache Point Observatory 3.5 meter telescope in Sunspot, NM, to image the night side of Venus. In the near-infrared, there are several spectral regions that are relatively clear in the Venus atmosphere. ... By imaging the Venus night side, an AOTF camera can determine spatial variations of trace molecular species in the Venusian atmosphere, and even study the dynamics of the zonal winds on Venus. ... APO Home Page . ...

Next: Sky problems Up: Special problems Previous: Special systems . Often, one finds that some nights of a run were of marginal photometric quality. ... How should these marginal nights be treated? ... In treating a bad night separately, one can either force the extinction coefficients to have particular values, or force the standard and extinction stars to have particular values (by creating a special standard-star file). ...

... 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. ...

... Wispy tendrils of hot dust and gas glow brightly in this ultraviolet image of the Cygnus Loop nebula, taken by NASA s Galaxy Evolution Explorer. The nebula lies about 1,500 light-years away and is a supernova remnant, left over from a massive stellar explosion that occurred between 5,000 to 8,000 years ago. ... The filaments of gas and dust visible here in ultraviolet light were heated by the shock wave from the supernova, which is still spreading outward from the original explosion. ...

Magne&c fields in the Smith Cloud Alex S Hill (CSIRO), Robert A Benjamin (UW- Whitewater), Sui Ann Mao (UW- Madison, NRAO), Naomi M McClure- Griffiths (CSIRO), F Jay Lockman (NRAO), & Bryan Gaensler (U Sydney) CSIRO AOPQRSRTU V SWXYZ SY[ZSYZ www.csiro.au Introduc&on Infall of low- metallicity gas is needed to explain the obse r v e d star for m a&on r ate and m ass- m e tallic ity rela&onship in galaxies (Pagel 1994). ... 2: Grayscale: H emission from the Smith Cloud Circles denote RMs as in Fig. ...

We report on recent observations of molecular clouds in the tidal Magellanic Bridge; specifically, the Ы?kpc-long, tidally extended "tail" of the Small Magellanic Cloud. In particular, we identify an unusually high 12CO(3-2)/12CO(1-0) ratio of 2-3 to 1, toward one of the clouds, suggesting a warm and dense molecular material associated with imminent or current formation of stars. ...

These NASA Hubble Space Telescope pictures of comet Hale-Bopp show a remarkable "pinwheel" pattern and a blob of free-flying debris near the nucleus. The bright clump of light along the spiral (above the nucleus, which is near the center of the frame) may be a piece of the comet's icy crust that was ejected into space by a combination of ice evaporation and the comet's rotation, and which then disintegrated into a bright cloud of particles. ...

Here is an image a supernova in UGC3683. 11.4.1998. 0.08 UT, CCD ST-7, 520s. Track and Accumulate exposure (13x40s), no filter, dark and flat corrected, temp -20c, telescope used 152/2063 refractor. The image have been taken at the center of our city, Jyvaskyla. The weather was horrible (a full moon was shining and there was clouds on the sky during exposure), so I had stopped imaging in that night. ... Iґll wait for a next clear night and send a better image then. ...

... And night unto night revealeth knowledge; . ... They noticed that the stars in that celestial canopy, the "firmament," maintained fixed patterns-- constellations --night after night. ... Like a globe, the sphere of the sky has two points around which it turns, points that mark its axis --the poles of the celestial sphere. ... The axis around which the Earth spins points in a certain direction in the sky, and that is also the direction of the pole star (or more accurately, the northern celestial pole...

... S-6.The X-ray Sun . S-7.The Sun's Energy . S-7A. The Black Hole at . our Galactic Center . ... Our Sun is part of a huge wheel-shaped collection of stars. ... 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. ... Far from being a voracious devourer of stars and of interstellar gas, "our own" black hole is rather benign. ... What holds galaxies together? ...