... 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 Solar System from MESSENGER . ... The Sun's planets all appear as points of light, with the closest and largest planets appearing the brightest. Star Size Comparisons . ... To help illustrate the answer, a beautiful land, cloud, and skyscape was captured earlier this month over NeuchБtel, Switzerland. ... What's happened to these clouds? ... Spiral Galaxy NGC 2841 Close Up . ... Planetary Nebula Project . ... Inside the nebula lies an open cluster of bright young stars designated NGC 2244. ...

. Album : Фотоальбом Сергея Аюкова :: Travels to distant places and countries :: 1997/08 Japan (Kyoto, Nara) :: 17/08 Kyoto streets. Maruyama park . Up . << Prev . Dreaming about things on display. After checking, they appeared to be not that tasty compared to how they look. Next >> . Created with the tool album generator from David's MarginalHacks on Wed Jun 5 20:38:34 2013 .

... Planets . ... Earth Satellites . ... Looking in the direction of the constellation Cygnus the Swan and launched by NASA in 2009 is the Kepler Space Observatory.Many previous missions searching for exoplanets mainly detected large giant planets, like large hot Jupiters (it is easier to detect larger planets).However KeplerтАЩs main objective is to search for much smaller planets located in a habitable zone which is not too close nor too far from their star; planets which may be just like our Earth. ...

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The Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) at ESO s Paranal Observatory in Chile has obtained the sharpest view ever of the dusty disk around the close pair of aging stars IRAS 08544-4431. For the first time, such disks can be compared to the disks around young stars and they look surprisingly similar. ... The inset shows the VLTI reconstructed image, with the brighter central star removed. The background view shows the surroundings of this star in the constellation Vela the Sails. ...

... 2012 February 29 . Moon and Planets Over Catalonia . ... Explanation: Venus and Jupiter will appear unusually close in the sky over the next month. ... In the above image composite taken late last week from Catalonia , Spain , a bright crescent moon appears to the right of Venus, while Jupiter appears near the top of the image. ... A gallery of conjunction images is visible on the Asterisk -- APOD's discussion board. ... The next Jupiter-Venus conjunction will occur in May 2013. ... About APOD | ...

The silicates that produce the 10 and 18 micron features appear to be broadly similar to terrestrial minerals such as Forsterite and Enstatite. ... Where pre-solar silicate dust grains can be isolated from meteorite material, these also tend to be Mg-rich silicates rather than Fe-rich silicates. ... It has been suggested that the interstellar silicate grains have a different 10 micron feature profile than what is observed for the silicates around evolved stars. ...

... Figure 8: Can you detect the motion of the near-Earth asteroid 2000PH against the background stars during its close approach to Earth around 27 July 2004? ... Down) observed and imaged the unusual near-Earth asteroid 2000PH during its close approach to the Earth around 27 July 2004. The observations were carried out remotely using the new 2m aperture Faulkes telescope situated on the 10,000-foot summit of Haleakala, on the island of Maui in Hawaii. ...

... Section M-7 describes the basic problem of trigonometry (drawing on the left): finding the distance to some far-away point C, given the directions at which C appears from the two ends of a measured baseline AB. ... That means that the angle ? ... 2? r covers an angle 360њ . ... Suppose you want to estimate the distance to some distant landmark--e.g. a building, tree or water tower. ... Alpha Centauri, the sun-like star nearest to our solar system, has a distance of 4.3 years and a parallax of 0.75"....

Classroom Activity: Pinhole Protractor Gene Byrd and Renato Dupke . ... We cannot directly perceive the distances or sizes of far-away objects. Instead, our eyes only detect the angular size of objects. ... In Part II, which will appear in a future issue of The Universe in the Classroom, students will see how astronomers use parallax -- an extension of binocular vision -- to determine the distances of stars in the Sun's neighborhood. ... distance = 57.3 x physical size angular size (in degrees). ...