Feed aggregator

Comet Garradd and M92 Sweeping slowly through the constellation Hercules, Comet Garradd (C2009/P1) passed with about 0.5 degrees of globular star cluster M92 on February 3. Captured here in its latest Messier moment, the steady performer remains just below naked-eye visibility with a central coma comparable in brightness to the dense, well-known star cluster. The rich telescopic view from New Mexico's, early morning skies, also features Garradd's broad fan shaped dust tail and a much narrower ion tail that extends up and beyond the right edge of the frame. Pushed out by the pressure of sunlight, the dust tail tends to trail the comet along its orbit while the ion tail, blown by the solar wind, streams away from the comet in the direction opposite the Sun. Of course, M92 is over 25,000 light-years away. Comet Garradd is 12.5 light-minutes from planet Earth, arcing above the ecliptic plane.

When most people think about astronomy they almost immediately picture beautiful images of nebulae, galaxies and star clusters. The primary reason they are able to visualize these objects is because of the amazing work of the Hubble Space Telescope.

...

Read Full Post

Eratosthenes and Environs

December 4, 2011. 22:00-22:30UT. 200mm SCT f/10. 333x

Object Name: Eratosthenes Crater
Object Type: Lunar Crater
Location: Naxxar, Malta
Date: December 4, 2011
Media: Graphite pencil, white paper, blending stumps, erasor, GIMP.
Telescope: 8 inch f/ 10 SCT Dobsonian and 10mm eyepiece using binoviewer
Date: 12-04-2011 22:00-22:30 UT
Charles Galdies – http://znith-observatory.blogspot.com

Eratosthenes is a very dramatic and beautiful deep crater with a well-defined circular rim, terraced inner walls, a central mountain peak, but lacking its own ray system. The sketch, which is my third and best sketch of Eratosthenes so far, was done at relatively low sun-angles to bring out the shadow cast by the crater and adjacent western terminus of the Montes Apenninus mountain range. What makes this formation interesting to sketch is its linkage with the Apennine mountain chain.

In my sketch I tried to bring out the following features:

Rays from the prominent crater Copernicus to the south-west
Fine detail of the western terminus of the Montes Apenninus mountain range.
Numerous craterlets which typify the region around Eratosthenes
Internal wall terracing

Way back in 1924 Pickering noted dark patches in the crater that varied in a regular manner with time. He attributed these mobile patches to around 36 different flowering plants. Check out this old document http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/1925PA…..33..629M/0000630.000.html written by one of his associates about this.

Scientists have pooled their radio observations into a database, producing the highest precision map to date of the magnetic field within our own Milky Way galaxy.

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has taken a picture of the barred spiral galaxy NGC 1073, which is found in the constellation of Cetus (The Sea Monster). Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is a similar barred spiral, and the study of galaxies such as NGC 1073 helps astronomers learn more about our celestial home.

Mars may have been arid for more than 600 million years, making it too hostile for any life to survive on the planet’s surface, according to researchers who have been carrying out the painstaking task of analyzing individual particles of Martian soil.

Inside the Eagle Nebula In 1995, a now famous picture from the Hubble Space Telescope featured Pillars of Creation, star forming columns of cold gas and dust light-years long inside M16, the Eagle Nebula. This remarkable false-color composite image revisits the nearby stellar nursery with image data from the orbiting Herschel Space Observatory and XMM-Newton telescopes. Herschel's far infrared detectors record the emission from the region's cold dust directly, including the famous pillars and other structures near the center of the scene. Toward the other extreme of the electromagnetic spectrum, XMM-Newton's X-ray vision reveals the massive, hot stars of the nebula's embedded star cluster. Hidden from Hubble's view at optical wavelengths, the massive stars have a profound effect, sculpting and transforming the natal gas and dust structures with their energetic winds and radiation. In fact, the massive stars are short lived and astronomers have found evidence in the image data pointing to the remnant of a supernova explosion with an apparent age of 6,000 years. If true, the expanding shock waves would have destroyed the visible structures, including the famous pillars. But because the Eagle Nebula is some 6,500 light-years distant, their destruction won't be witnessed for hundreds of years.

Vesta and The Hyades

Hey Artists!

Yes, this is a real old, restaurated sketch from the good old days, but it shows asteroid Vestas
movement across the beautiful Hyade star cluster over a observation time of 17 days.
I have org. 11 observations of Vestas positions, but 4 on this sketch. Info on the sketch.
I used pen and pencil on white paper (inverted).
Location: Trondheim, Norway.
I hope you like it!

Best wishes from : Per-Jonny Bremseth.

Pulsars are among the most exotic celestial bodies known. They have diameters of about 20 kilometers, but at the same time roughly the mass of our sun. A sugar-cube sized piece of its ultra-compact matter on Earth would weigh hundreds of millions of tons. A sub-class of them, known as millisecond pulsars, spin up to several hundred times per second around their own axes. Previous studies reached the paradoxical conclusion that some millisecond pulsars are older than the universe itself. Now this paradox may be solved by computer simulations, new research shows.

Sientists have discovered a potentially habitable super-Earth orbiting a nearby star. The star is a member of a triple star system and has a different makeup than our Sun, being relatively lacking in metallic elements. This discovery demonstrates that habitable planets could form in a greater variety of environments than previously believed.

Astronomers aimed Hubble at one of the most striking examples of gravitational lensing, a nearly 90-degree arc of light in the galaxy cluster RCS2 032727-132623. Hubble's view of the distant background galaxy, which lies nearly 10 billion light-years away, is significantly more detailed than could ever be achieved without the help of the gravitational lens.

The center of just about every galaxy is thought to host a black hole, some with masses of thousands of millions of Suns and consequently strong gravitational pulls that disrupt material around them. They had been thought to hinder the birth of stars, but now astronomers studying the nearby galaxy Centaurus A have found quite the opposite: a black hole that seems to be helping stars to form.

La Silla Star Trails North and South Fix your camera to a tripod and you can record graceful trails traced by the stars as planet Earth rotates on its axis. If the tripod is set up at ESO's La Silla Observatory, high in the Atacama desert of Chile, your star trails would look something like this. Spanning about 4 hours on the night of January 24, the image is actually a composite of 250 consecutive 1-minute exposures, looking toward the north. The North Celestial Pole, at the center of the star trail arcs, is just below the horizon in this southern hemisphere perspective. In the foreground, the polished 15-meter diameter dish antenna of the Swedish-ESO Submillimeter Telescope (now decommissioned) shows star trails toward the south by reflection. Sweeping around the South Celestial Pole, the distorted arcs of those stars appear underneath the southern horizon in the focusing dish's inverted view. Right of the dish is the dome of the observatory's 3.6 meter telescope, home to the planet hunting HARPS spectrograph.

Crater Line Linne (Move mouse over image to view labels)

This clear, cold evening provided from my location the opportunity to observe and sketch the straight line row of small craters from Linne A to Linne G. All five of these craters range from three to five kilometers in diameter. Other yet smaller craters were spotted during brief moments of good seeing but were not included in this sketch. Near the top center of the sketch the sixth bowl shaped crater Banting (5 km.) is clearly visible. South is up in the sketch so the Little Linne sequence from top to bottom is A ( 4 km.), B ( 5 km.), F ( 5 km.), H ( 3 km.), and G ( 5 km.). What especially caught my eye here on the floor of Mare Serentitatis were the fine, long shadows from each of these little craters.

Sketching:

For this sketch I used: Canson Black Ingres textured paper 8″ x12″, white and black tone pastel pencils and crayons, blending stumps, white pearl eraser

Telescope: 10 inch f/ 5.7 Dobsonian and 6 mm eyepiece for a magnification of 241x
Date: 01-30-2012 1:20-2:00 UT
Temperature: -4°C (24° F)
Clear, calm
Seeing: Pickering 5/10 – Antoniadi III
Co longitude: 347.3°
Lunation: 6.74 days
Illumination: 39.6%
Frank McCabe

A camera aboard one of NASA's twin Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) lunar spacecraft has returned its first unique view of the far side of the moon. MoonKAM, or Moon Knowledge Acquired by Middle school students, will be used by students nationwide to select lunar images for study.

A potent follow-up solar flare, which occurred Jan. 17, 2012, just days after the Sun launched the biggest coronal mass ejection seen in nearly a decade, delivered a powerful radiation punch to Earth's magnetic field despite the fact that it was aimed away from our planet.

Using models similar to those used in weapons research, scientists may soon know more about exoplanets, those objects beyond the realm of our solar system. Astronomers have come up with new methods for deriving and testing the equation of state of matter in exoplanets and figured out the mass-radius and mass-pressure relations for materials relevant to planetary interiors.

A new view shows a stellar nursery called NGC 3324. It was taken using the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile. The intense ultraviolet radiation from several of NGC 3324's hot young stars causes the gas cloud to glow with rich colors and has carved out a cavity in the surrounding gas and dust.

Red Aurora Over Australia
Why would the sky glow red? Aurora. Last week's solar storms, emanating mostly from active sunspot region 1402, showered particles on the Earth that excited oxygen atoms high in the Earth's atmosphere. As the excited element's electrons fell back to their ground state, they emitted a red glow. Were oxygen atoms lower in Earth's atmosphere excited, the glow would be predominantly green. Pictured above, this high red aurora is visible just above the horizon last week near Flinders, Victoria, Australia. The sky that night, however, also glowed with more familiar but more distant objects, including the central disk of our Milky Way Galaxy on the left, and the neighboring Large and Small Magellanic Cloud galaxies on the right. A time-lapse video highlighting auroras visible that night puts the picturesque scene in context. Why the sky did not also glow green remains unknown.

NGC 55

Object Name: NGC 55
Object Type: Galaxy
Location: Cherry Springs Dark Sky Park, Pennsylvania
Date: December 26, 2011
Media: Digitally simulated chalk over an inverted scan of the original in ball-pen.
NGC 55 and IC 1537 culminate over a distant tree line at latitude 42 North. 12” SCT with a diagonal, i.e. north is up and west is left. 125x. Visible asymmetry of the bright core in NGC 55. The fainter IC 1537 is in
actuality a star cloud in NGC 55. Due to low altitude it appears completely detached.