... 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. ...

... What would it look like to peer into one of the volcanoes currently active on Jupiter's moon Io? ... Comet Ikeya Zhang over Tenerife . ... The comet appears.. ... Known to some as the Elephant's Trunk Nebula, parts of gas and dust clouds of this star formation region may appear to take on foreboding forms, some nearly human. ... This image from the Hubble Space Telescope reveals the Cat's Eye Nebula to be one of the most complex planetary nebulae known. ... Odyssey Over Mars . ...

... To be read in conjunction with Section 4.11 of the WFPC2 Instrument Handbook , -Version 4.0. ... 1 The second study found evidence that CTE loss for faint stars has increased with time (Whitmore, 1998). The primary observational consequence of CTE loss is that a point source at the top of the chip appears to be fainter than if observed at the bottom of the chip, due to the loss of electrons as the star is read out down the chip (see Figure 1 ). ... Last updated: 06/16/98 10:38:00 . ...

I-GALFA Reveals Dynamic Events in Our Galaxy . S. J. Gibson, J.-h. Kang, B.-C. Koo, June 2009 . ... The white stripe marks the Galactic equator ( b=0 ). ... I-GALFA three-color H I image for FVW40.0+0.5, integrated over v lsr = -100 to -90 km/s ( red ), -90 to -80 km/s ( green ), and -80 to -70 km/s ( blue ). ... I-GALFA data reveal a complex tracery of loops, filaments, and blobs hundreds of parsecs above and below the Galactic plane, with isolated compact clouds extending even higher. ...

... V838 Mon is a member of a new class of eruptive variables which appear as a peculiar novae having late K-M type spectra in their outburst. Before its outburst, it was a wide binary system of B3V type stars. ... The B3V companion was seen in the outburst in the UV spectrum taken with HST (Rauch et al., ... In the latest spectra, the light of B3V companion was predominating in the short-wave photometric bands. ... CCD blue frames of V838 Mon before the eclipse (left) and in the eclipse (right). ...

... 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 | ...

. The Spitzer Space Telescope reveals infrared radiation coming from dust particles heated by the supernova's shock wave. The glow appears brightest just outside the regions seen by Hubble. Four hundred years after the explosion, Kepler's supernova remnant now spans 14 light-years. NASA/ESA/JHU/R. Sankrit and W. Blair

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 . ...

... From Terry Moseley: "A very bright fireball was seen widely over Ireland, and even as far away as Liverpool, at about 00.30 on Sunday morning, 4 April. John McConnell saw it from Maghaberry, Co Antrim, and a woman saw it from her home in Newry, Co Down. The Liverpool observer reports that the fireball appeared at 30 - 40 degrees altitude in the western sky at 00:33 UT on 2009 April 05. ... I saw it) early Sunday morning at 00:32 BST. ... International Year of Astronomy, Ireland National Node . ...

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. ...

... STScI-PRC99-05a NICMOS PEERS THROUGH DUST TO REVEAL YOUNG STELLAR DISKS The following images were taken by NASA Hubble Space Telescope' Near-Infrared Camera s and Multi-Object Spectrometer. ... A thin , dark lane extends to the left and to righ t of th e binary, suggesting that a disk or ring o f dusty material encircles the two young stars. ... The young star itself appears as the bright red spot at the corner of the V-shaped nebula. ...

... 2004: . ... An increase in star brightness is followed by a decrease in asphericity and wind velocity to the point where stationary and even accreting fraction of the wind appears in extremely bright objects together with a flowing out fraction. ... Based on an analysis of observations obtained with BTA and on the published data it was found that degree of abnormality of energy distribution in continuum of magnetic chemically peculiar stars increases with an increase of their rotation period. ...

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 . ...

... Data It is now clear that fuzzballs are actually galaxies. ... Using the automatic telescope, we measured the redshifts and brightnesses of a large number of fuzzballs in all regions of the sky. ... Correlation between brightness and redshift Redshifts and Brightnesses 0.005 0.004 0.003 0.002 0.001 0 -0.001 0 -0.002 -0.003 -0.004 -0.005 Redshift of Fuzzball 500 1000 1500 2000 Brightness of Fuzzball The brightnesses and redshifts of all the fuzzballs measured are shown in this graph. ...

... Virginia Kilborn's program gfinder was run on 388 luthered and edge-masked HIPASS cubes , covering the whole southern sky, over all 1024 channels (i.e. -1281 to 12741 km/s), with an HI peak flux cutoff of 60 mJy/beam. ... The large number of candidates is mostly due to artifacts generated in areas of strong continuum flux, mostly the Galactic Plane, (causing a baseline ripple), the HI emission in our Galaxy, and lots of interference (1408 MHz birdie, GPS etc.) ... Number of galaxies: . ... galaxies ...

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 . ...

... Science User Portal . ... ESO, the European Southern Observatory . ... Travel and Contacts . Travel to ESO Headquarters . ... Travel to Guesthouse . ... Survey Telescopes . ... This video fades back and forth between views of the stellar nursery Monoceros R2 in visible and infrared light. The visible-light view was created from digitised photographs through red and blue filters forming part of the Digitized Sky Survey 2 (DSS) and the new infrared view comes from the VISTA telescope at Paranal. ...

... 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. ...

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. ...

... If the chain runs to completion, a number of important output files will appear. ... The names of the files start with `p' for the products and with `g' for the intermediate or auxiliar images and source lists. ... Check whether all the sources are detected. For this purpose overlay the image source list onto skymap using implot , e.g. implot set= sky_image_file.FIT withsrclistset=y srclistset= osw_source_list_file.FIT device= your_device (e.g. /XW ) itv=1 radius=3 maxsrc=10 colour=7 . ...