... 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. ...

... Mars to Appear Normal this August . ... October is the best month to see Mars this year. ... As Earth catches up to Mars in their respective orbits around the Sun, Mars will keep rising earlier in the night. On 2005 October 30, Earth will have caught up to Mars and the planets will be the nearest to each other in their orbits -- this time around. On October 30, Mars will be nearly opposite to the Sun, rise at sunset, set at sunrise, and appear highest and brightest around midnight. ...

... 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. ...

... 2005 August 8 . Mars to Appear Normal This August . ... Regardless of numerous urban legends circulating, Mars will appear relatively normal in August. October is the best month to see Mars this year. ... As Earth catches up to Mars in their respective orbits around the Sun, Mars will keep rising earlier in the night. On 2005 October 30, Earth will have caught up to Mars and the planets will be the nearest to each other in their orbits -- this time around. ... About APOD | ...

... More on 51 Peg: . The discovery of a Jupiter--mass planet in orbit around the solar--type star 51Peg has been reported by Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz (Geneva Observatory) on October 6th at the 9th Cambridge workshop on "cool stars, stellar systems, and the sun" held at Florence (Italy). ... Recall that the measurements of radial velocity only yield v sin i which in turn gives us M sin i. For most values of i, sin i will be greater than 0.5 and this gives a mass estimate of 0.5 Jupiter masses. ...

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. ...

I was wondering what conditions should be met to have the "darkest" sky .. ... Upon the above publication of the Southern Galactic hemisphere, TunГ Tezel started seeking opportunities to create the Northern counterpart image. ... So, the initial quest of having the darkest possible sky have delivered us these two all-sky images of the two galactic hemispheres as seen from Planet Earth. Zoomable and 'full-screenable' fisheye view of the "darkest sky" Southern Galactic Hemisphere image. ...

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 | ...

... Aurora from Space . ... Magnetic Storms . ... Solar fast Particles . ... Currently more than 200 communication satellites circle the Earth in synchronous orbit . ... Another effect of magnetic storms (and to lesser extent, of substorms) is a greater intensity of the electric currents circulating between Earth and distant space. ... One spacecraft would orbit near Earth, the other would be stationed elsewhere in the Earth's orbit around the Sun, capturing a sideways view of solar eruptions. ...

... 8, ``Celestial Mechanics'', 2002 Estimation of masses of some minor planets from observations of perturbed bodies O. M. Kochetova Institute of Applied Astronomy, St. Petersburg, Russia The most straightforward method of mass determination of minor planets is the dynamical one which uses the gravitational perturbations produced by minor planet in the motion of other bodies. ... The values of the masses of minor planets (15), (29) and (65) appear to be rather close in both papers. ...

... The planets differ greatly in size and properties, and their fields differ too. ... In 1959, after the Earth's radiation belt had been discovered, Frank Drake observed Jupiter and concluded from the relative intensities in a range of wavelengths that the signal was probably emitted by electrons trapped in a strong magnetic field. Then in 1973 the space probe Pioneer 10 passed by Jupiter and found there, sure enough, an enormous planetary magnetic field and a very intense radiation belt. ...

The following are some standard questions that observers have about their fixed target confirmation charts. ... Why doesn't my target appear to be centered on the cross hairs? ... How is proper motion handled? ... Target well centered . If your target is not perfectly centered in the cross hairs, see the questions below for why it may not be centered and how well centered it must be . ... So, targets to be acquired by STIS should appear well centered in the cross hairs on the confirmation chart. ...

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. ...

This service is intended as an aid to visually observing close-approaching asteroids. ... By clicking on the column headers for "Object Name", "Maximum Brightness", and "Maximum Angular Speed", you can sort the list by those fields. ... When This is the predicted time when the asteroid will be closest to the Earth. ... This field shows red if an asteroid comes as close as the moon. ... PHA (Potentially Hazardous Asteroid) This does NOT mean that this is going to hit the Earth. ...

ChangeLog for lccorr =============================== Open SPRs: ---------- 3111 Version 2.2.8 - 2004-03-17 (IMS/LUX) ------------------------- - Fixed SPR 3280. ... Version 2.2.6 - 2004-03-15 (IMS/LUX) ------------------------- - Fixed SPR 3272. ... Version 1.5 - 14 Sep 2001 (IMS/LUX) ------------------------- - Fixed another depend error. Version 1.4.5 - 17 May 2001 (IMS/LUX) ------------------------- - Fixed depend error. ... SPR deprecating use of caps in taskname macro fixed. ...

... This artist's concept shows a lump of material in a swirling, planet- . ... Astronomers have witnessed odd behavior around a young star. Something, perhaps another star or a planet, appears to be pushing a clump of planet-forming material around. ... Spitzer observed infrared light coming from one such disk around a young star, called LRLL 31, over a period of five months. ... could be shoving planet-forming material together, causing its thickness to vary as it spins around the star. ...

New reduction of minor planets photographic plates obtained with Pulkovo Normal Astrograph A.A. Berezhnoy Pulkovo Observatory of RAS, Saint-Petersburg, Russia Minor Planet observations at Pulkovo Periodical observations of 14 bright asteroids named Selected Minor Planets (SMP) were performed at Pulkovo since 1948 within the international framework started by works of B.V. Numerov and D. Brouwer. ... 108 133 113 74 124 67 97 88 14 84 64 5 20 19 Epochs (YYYY.MM) 1200 Mean values of total obs. ...

... This appendix describes how to use the JavaScript console to evaluate expressions and display error messages to the user. ... Displaying Error Messages with the Console JavaScript 1.2 and earlier versions. ... You can specify whether to automatically open the console when a JavaScript error occurs or to display a dialog box for each JavaScript error. ... To open a dialog box each time an error occurs, add the following line to prefs.js : user_pref("javascript.classic.error_alerts", true); . ...

Next: Imaging by an Optimizing Method . ... A big advantage of this numerical integrator is its stability: the error in the semi-major axis and the eccentricity depends only on the step size and does not grow with an increasing number of time steps. ... As the integration time increases, the numerical results become more contaminated by various errors. ... A new symplectic integrator produces no secular truncation errors in the actions of a Hamiltonian system. ...

This replacement emx.dll is intended for use with the Apache web server. It fixes two problems: 1) emx.dll contains a fixed size array that is used to keep track of dlls loaded by the process so that fork() can correctly duplicate the process. When a large number of Apache modules are loaded this array runs out of space causing the error "[error] (12)Not enough memory: fork: Unable to fork new process" in the error log. To work around this I've simply doubled the size of the array. ...