... 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. ...

... APOD: 2015 July 7 The Milky Way from a Malibu Sea Cave . ... Colorful Clouds Near Rho Ophiuchi . ... Why is the sky near Antares and Rho Ophiuchi so colorful? ... Not fireworks, these intense shimmering lights still danced across Earth's night skies late last month, seen here above the planet's geographic south pole. ... Venus and Jupiter are Far . ... Venus, Jupiter, and Noctilucent Clouds . ... Today the planets Jupiter and Venus pass within half a degree of each other as seen from Earth. ...

HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE DAILY REPORT #997 PERIOD COVERED: 0800 EST Daily Status Report as of 293/1200Z. 1.0 ACTIVITIES SCHEDULED AND ACCOMPLISHED: 1.1 Completed Two Sets of GHRS/2 5251 (WF/PC Shutter Control AP Test) The High Resolution Spectrograph was used to make observations of standard star BD+75D325 as part of a shutter control test. ... 1.7 Completed PC 5014 (WF/PC Cycle 3 Calibration: PC Flats Narrow. ... The observations were executed as scheduled, and no problems were reported. ...

... 2002 August 5 . Rays from an Unexpected Aurora . ... For starters, last Friday morning, no intense auroral activity was expected at all. Possibly more surprising, however, the aurora appeared to show an usual structure of green rays from some locations. ... Large sunspot groups indicate that activity from the currently active Sun is relatively likely, possibly causing other streams of energetic particles to cascade onto the Earth and so causing more auroras . ... About APOD | ...

... Planets . ... Earth Satellites . ... The newly discovered ?mega-Earth? ... Its sibling, the lava world Kepler-10b, is in the background (the two planets? proximity is grossly exaggerated) .€а Kepler-10c has a diameter of about 29 000 km, 2.3 times as large as Earth, and weighs 17 times as much. ... The first mega-earth to be discovered is Kepler-10c which orbits a star lying about 560 light years from the Sun in the constellation Draco. ... Astronomers Find a New Type of Planet: The ?Mega-Earth? ...

... 227Wink This paper containes an investigation of 91 sources which appear to be point sources when observed with the angular resolution of the 100-m telescope at 4.9 GHz, teta_a = 2.6', and which we expected to be HII regions. The basic search list was prepared from the 4.9 GHz survey of the galactic plane by Altenhoff et al. ... In the present paper we list 4.9 GHz flux densities only for sources for sources for which we present new observations. ... source structure indicated . ...

Next: The ESO VLT CCD Detectors Software . ... Up: Instrument-Specific Software . ... The framework for data calibration and analysis of the VLT instrumentation is presented, based on the concepts of a calibration plan, pipeline calibration, quality control, and archiving of calibrated data for a ground-based observatory. ... Quality Control Pipeline provides quality assessment for instrument performance data and observing conditions, and tests the results of the Reduction Pipeline. ...

The rates of build-up in the atmosphere of human-made compounds that deplete the ozone layer (e.g., chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and halons) have slowed in recent years as a direct result of reductions in global emissions of these compounds. ... The peak global ozone depletions are expected to occur during the next several years. ... Methyl bromide continues to be viewed as a significant ozone- depleting chemical. ...

... Analysis of in-orbit data closely follow the CSL data analysis. Stars with known astrometric positions are matched with their image centroids. ... The measured position, the expected position and the offset between the measured and expected positions are calculated and written into a file. ... select catalogued positions for different observations/pointings (e.g. positions of objects in photometric sequence) . ... The new distortion map was generated from in-flight observations of the G153 field. ...

Trail encounter . ... Expected meteor rates . ... The Leonids are the debris of Comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle. ... The Earth's passage right through the centre of trails is associated with the most spectacular meteor displays (studies show that, as well as how close to the centre of the trail you are, the strength of the display also depends on how far along a trail's length you are). ... The encounter with the 1932 trail will lead to enhanced meteor activity: a nice outburst, but below storm level. ...

... PmWiki . ... PmWiki FAQ . ... Go to new wiki . ... Note: This page on pmwiki.org is probably not the best place to post questions. ... Local copies of pages are stored in wiki.d/ and not wikilib.d/ .) ... Something (or someone) has changed the permissions on the wiki.d/.flock file or the wiki.d/ directory such that the webserver is no longer able to write the lockfile. The normal solution is to simply delete the .flock file from the wiki.d/ directory -- PmWiki will then create a new one. ...

Proposal Identification No.: ... 25 Hours Proposal Title: Radio OH Observations of Comet C/1994 S4 LINEAR ABSTRACT: In comets, a strong observed 18­cm OH line can be produced as the comet amplifies or absorbs background radiation. In highly productive comets, OH spectral lines in the inner coma appear weaker than expected because gas collisions thermalize and ''quench'' this maser emission. ... Maybe Part of the observing run. ...

Rosetta s continued close study of Comet 67P/Churyumov€н Gerasimenko has revealed an unexpected process at work close to the comet nucleus that causes the rapid breakup of water and carbon dioxide molecules. First, an ultraviolet photon from the Sun hits a water molecule in the comet s coma and ionizes it, knocking out an energetic electron. This electron then hits another water molecule in the coma, breaking it apart into two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen, and energizing them in the process. ...

... David P. Stern Laboratory for Extraterrestrial Physics NASA . ... Alfv?n's Theory and Electric Fields . ... The debate between proponents of a static corona, Parker's solar wind theory, and an alternative "solar breeze" theory of Chamberlai n [1960, 1961; Dessler 1967] was only settled by observations from space. ... Rapidly spreading plasma clouds produced by solar flares, like those envisioned by Chapman and Ferraro, are sometimes superposed on the solar wind flow. ...

... N. Kardashev and M. Popov informed the participants on the current IOC results. ... Kovalev). ... Agenda of the RadioAstron teleconference November 16, 2011 Corrections to the Agenda 1 2 3 4 5 6 IOC status and results Single Dish observation with RA VLBA observations to find best fringe search candidates Fringe search plan Early science program plan Tracking stations outside Russia N.Kardashev N. Kardashev / M.Popov V. Kostenko E.Fomalont M.Popov Y.Y. Kovalev / M.Popov /A.Alakoz ...

... The most spectacular view however is from space, where large areas of aurora can be observed simultaneously, even the entire polar cap. ... Such pictures often show a continuous ring of aurora around the polar cap (picture above), caused mostly by electrons leaking out along magnetic field lines, from the plasma sheet of the Earth's magnetic tail. ... Field lines from the auroral oval are believed to lead to the plasma sheet. ... A near-Earth circular polar orbit has many uses. ...

... S.P. KOROLEV ROCKET AND SPACE CORPORATION ENERGIA . ... OAO RSC "Energia" . ... Company's History . ... History . Brief History of Rocket and Space Technology . ... Flights Chronology . ... Project History . ISS Russian Segment . Steps of ISS Assembly . Spaceflights Chronology . Chronology of Extravehicular Activity . ISS 45/46 . ... Rocket Space Complexes . ... Launches Chronology . ... Automatic Space Systems . ... HISTORY . ... 2015 JSC "S.P. Korolev RSC "Energia" . ...

In 2001, Westerbork observations of the disturbed galaxy named VV-29 (alias Arp-188, UGC-10214) showed that there is second smaller galaxy (named VV-29c) that appears behind the western side of the main body of the distorted galaxy. ... The galaxy was featured as the May 2, 2002 Astronomy Picture of the Day . ... When VV-29 had its 15 minutes of fame in May 2002, it appeared under the name "The Tadpole Galaxy," but based on the images above, we will always think of it as "The CHAINSAW"! ...

... Science . ... Science Users Information > Data Handling and Products > Data Reduction FAQ > I see unexpected boxy emission-like features in my REDL spectra - where do they come from? ... Observing with ESO Telescopes . ... ESO-MIDAS . ... ESO Data . ... The pipeline by default interpolates across the bad columns in the REDL CCD when it creates the master bias, but does not so when it processes the science data. This inconsistency can create boxy emission-like features as seen in the figure below. ...

Yesterday I got a fragment (first 12 disks of 43 total) of Merlin beta 9.014 (string appeared in kernel and drivers; cmd.exe reports 9.012). ... Those 12 disks appeared to be sufficient to pass 1st phase of installation and run Merlin off Maintenance Desktop. ... 1) HPFS 2MB cache limit is still there. ... InfoPM shows about the same graphics performance as on Warp 3.0 (slightly worse on some operations). ... Looks like at least keyboard layout will be easily customizable in Merlin. ...