The Upcoming Celestial Events thread

[J_rod7]

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THREE CHEERS for Hubble, an amazing Telescope.


Hubble captures views of mammoth stars



Two of our galaxy's most massive stars, until recently shrouded in mystery, have been viewed by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, unveiling greater detail than ever before.

The image shows a pair of colossal stars, WR 25 and Tr16-244, located within the open cluster Trumpler 16. This cluster is embedded within the Carina Nebula, an immense cauldron of gas and dust that lies approximately 7500 light-years from Earth. The Carina Nebula contains several ultra-hot stars, including these two star systems and the famous blue star Eta Carinae, which has the highest luminosity yet confirmed. The the Eta Carinae Nebula is much less well known, due to its location far in the southern hemisphere.

We are thankful for the Hubble Scope for this image. The true color of these Stars is an amazing joy to see. For a Beautiful High-Res view, go to this address and click on the photo...:

http://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEMWHR5DHNF_index_0.html


Hubble sees magnetic monster in erupting galaxy



The Hubble Space Telescope has found the answer to a long-standing puzzle by seeing the details of giant but delicate filaments shaped by a strong magnetic field around the active galaxy NGC 1275.

These filaments are the only visible-light manifestation of the intricate relationship between the black hole hosted at the centre of the galaxy and the surrounding cluster gas. They provide important clues about how giant black holes affect their surrounding environment.

For a High-Res view go here and click on the photo...:

http://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEMM707UWJF_index_0.html

The High Res photos are MUCH too large to fit on the Page here

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[Dantheman62]

Awesome!

[judykott]

Love this thread , it is out of this world. Thanks for all the postings!

[iainl140285]

Originally Posted by Dantheman62

Explanation: Is our Galaxy this thin? We believe so. Magnificent spiral galaxy NGC 4565 is likely similar to our own spiral galaxy, but viewed edge-on from far away. Also known as the Needle Galaxy for its narrow profile, bright NGC 4565 is a stop on many telescopic tours of the northern sky as it lies in the faint but well-groomed constellation Coma Berenices. This sharp color image reveals the galaxy's bulging central core dominated by light from a population of older, yellowish stars. The core is dramatically cut by obscuring dust lanes which lace NGC 4565's thin galactic plane. NGC 4565 lies about 30 million light-years distant and spans over 100,000 light-years in diameter. Visible through a small telescope, some sky enthusiasts consider NGC 4565 to be a prominent celestial masterpiece Messier missed.

Something I've always wondered - Can anyone explain how we get such pictures looking AT our galaxy when no man made object has seemingly left out galaxy?

I can understand how we could see objects looking OUT from the galaxy but how have they managed to do the reverse? i.e. Looking at our galaxy from the outside...

Thanks
Iain

[Orion11]

Hey Iain,

well, they really , truly do not know what our Mily Way galaxy looks like from the outside...

I recently read something on a science site...

that said many scientists now believe our Galaxy to actually have only 2 arms,
rather than 4 as previously thought.

interesting eh?

[Orion11]

Milky Way gets a makeover...
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sp...20080603a.html


http://www.viewzone.com/milkyway.html (good link, read this!))

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/01/milkyway/

http://www.manythings.org/voa/script...s_Thought.html

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9960025-7.html

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14057

[J_rod7]

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Iain, Quote under the photo: "Magnificent spiral galaxy NGC 4565 is likely similar to our own spiral galaxy,..."

No, WE don't have any photos of our own Galaxy from anywhere but from here at Earth. If anyone "out-there" has any such photos, they haven't shared them with us. I wish they would share everything they have with us, but we shall just have to be patient.

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[iainl140285]

Originally Posted by Orion11

Hey Iain,

well, they really , truly do not know what our Mily Way galaxy looks like from the outside...

I recently read something on a science site...

that said many scientists now believe our Galaxy to actually have only 2 arms,
rather than 4 as previously thought.

interesting eh?

Hey Orion + Jrod - thanks for clearing that up

That is interesting Orion yes. Are there any examples we know of out there of a galaxy only having 2 arms?

[Orion11]

hey there bro.. you are welcome...

and yep.. there are many actual pictures of real galaxies that have only 2 arms...

Here is a couple..

M51


M81




and this link.. i posted above.. http://www.viewzone.com/milkyway.html

tells how we (our solar system) is really not from the milky way at all!! but from the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy..
its got some interesting stuff!!..

like...

Scientists Now Know: We're Not From Here!

Summary & comments by Dan Eden for Viewzone

Imagine the shock of growing up in a loving family with people you call "Mum" and "Dad" and then, suddenly, learning that you are actually adopted!

This same sense of shock came as scientists announced that the Sun, the Moon, our planet and its siblings, were not born into the familiar band of stars known as the Milky Way galaxy, but we actually belong to a strange formation with the unfamiliar name of the Sagittarius Dwarf galaxy!

How can this be?

Using volumes of data from the Two-Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS), a major project to survey the sky in infrared light led by the University of Massachusetts, the astronomers are answering questions that have baffled scientists for decades and proving that our own Milky Way is consuming one of its neighbors in a dramatic display of ongoing galactic cannibalism. The study published in the Astrophysical Journal, is the first to map the full extent of the Sagittarius galaxy and show in visually vivid detail how its debris wraps around and passes through our Milky Way. Sagittarius is 10,000 times smaller in mass than the Milky Way, so it is getting stretched out, torn apart and gobbled up by the bigger Milky Way.


A new infra red digital survey of the entire sky was made in 2003. Teams from the universities of Virginia and Massachusetts used a supercomputer to sort through half a billion stars to create a -- NEW STAR MAP showing our Solar System (yellow circle) to be at the exact nexus crossroads where two galaxies are actually joining.

"It's clear who's the bully in the interaction," said Steven Majewski, U.Va. professor of astronomy and lead author on the paper describing the results.

"If people had infrared-sensitive eyes, the entrails of Sagittarius would be a prominent fixture sweeping across our sky," Majewski said. "But at human, visual wavelengths, they become buried among countless intervening stars and obscuring dust. The great expanse of the Sagittarius system has been hidden from view."

Not any more. By using infrared maps, the astronomers filtered away millions of foreground stars to focus on a type of star called an M giant. These large, infrared-bright stars are populous in the Sagittarius galaxy but uncommon in the outer Milky Way. The 2MASS infrared map of M giant stars analyzed by Majewski and collaborators is the first to give a complete view of the Milky Way galaxy's meal of Sagittarius stars, now wrapping like a spaghetti noodle around the Milky Way. Prior to this work, astronomers had detected only a few scattered pieces of the disrupted Sagittarius dwarf. Even the existence of Sagittarius was unknown until the heart of this nearest satellite galaxy of the Milky Way was discovered by a British team of astronomers in 1994.

[Dantheman62]

Interesting stuff!!!!, here's some more!

PHOTO IN THE NEWS: Milky Way's Turbulent Core in Hi-Res



January 6, 2009—The first infrared panorama of the Milky Way's center (detail of the full panorama above) has revealed a previously unknown population of massive stars scattered across the turbulent zone around our galaxy's core.
A composite of Hubble and Spitzer space-telescope observations, the panorama covers a 300-by-115-light-year area with a high enough resolution that—even at a distance of 26,000 light-years from Earth—objects as small as 20 times the size of our solar system are brought to light. Among these object are about 26 million stars, 300 of which can be identified as massive stars that are relatively young—a few million years old or less. About two-thirds of those 300 are single stars that are unexpectedly lying outside the three known clusters of star formation.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...way-photo.html

[Orion11]

What’s Up This Month - June 2009

June 2, 2009

As June arrives, the galaxy fields of spring slowly give way to the beautiful overhead arc of the Milky Way. On June 6, a nearly-full Moon passes in front of a bright red supergiant star in Scorpius. All planets are visible this month, though only Saturn is found in the evening sky.

For observers in the northern hemisphere, the sun lies high in the sky during the day and not far below the horizon at night, which makes for long twilight and short nights. Summer arrives at 5:46 GMT on June 21. But the days now– slowly at first– start getting shorter. (Of course, it’s the other way around for observers in the southern hemisphere).

Life is busy, I know. But try to get out to enjoy a few moments of stargazing. Let a few rays of ancient starlight strike your eye and incite your imagination.

Celestial Events in June

Moon occults Antares. In the evening of June 6, in the Caribbean, northern parts of Latin America, and all but northeastern and far western North America, the nearly-full Moon occults the bright supergiant star Antares in Scorpius. It should be quite a show. This month, you can see the dramatic rise of Scorpius in the late evening as it lurches over the south-eastern horizon, claws first, looking for its prey.

Io and Ganymede cast shadows simultaneously on the face of Jupiter from 8:06 to 10:16 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) on June 9. A small telescope at 100x or more should give you a good view. Click here to translate Greenwich Mean Time to the time in your area. The event will look a little like this…


Pluto lies directly opposite the Sun this month in northern Sagittarius. At 14th magnitude, it lies beyond the sight of all but the most determined stargazers.
Moon and Planets

The Moon. Full on June 7; new again on June 22. On June 19, as a thin waning crescent, the Moon is just 6-7 degrees above Venus and Mars in the pre-dawn sky.

Venus. The beautiful planet wheels away from the Earth and dims slightly in the morning sky. On June 6, the Sun illuminates only half of the face of Venus as seen from the Earth.

Mars. Lies about 10 degrees above the eastern horizon early in the month, rising a little higher towards the end.

Saturn follows Leo into the southwest after sunset. But it’s still putting on a good show. The rings tilt just 3 degrees from edge on. Regulus lies west of Saturn and Spica lies further east. Saturn is the one that doesn’t twinkle.

Jupiter. The king of planets lies in eastern Capricorn, low in the sky for northern observers again this year. Observe it carefully on nights with steady seeing, when the image of the planet doesn’t seem to “boil” in your field of view. As mentioned above, in a telescope, you can see a double shadow on the planet on the morning of June 9.

Neptune. Fairly dim at 8th magnitude. Even a good-sized telescope will struggle to show Neptune’s disk, which is only 2.3″ across. But the outer planet is less than 0.5 degrees from Jupiter all month, so you can see them in a single low-power field of view.

Uranus rises a couple hours after midnight. It’s in Pisces, near the “circlet” of stars that makes up the head of the western “fish”. It’s visible in a telescope before the sun rises.

Deep-Sky Sights

The fine double star Izar (epsilon Bootis) is well worth a look. Separated by just 3″, you’ll need decent seeing and a magnification of 100x or so to resolve the pair. The reward for your effort is the sight of a splendid contrast of color and brightness. The brighter star has exhausted its fuel and become a bright red-orange giant; the fainter is a bright white main sequence star which still burns hydrogen in its core. The pair lies about 200 light years away and takes more than 1,000 years to revolve around each other.

the double star Izar (left center) in the constellation Bootes

For southern observers, try Acrux (alpha Crucis), the magnificent double star at the foot of the Southern Cross. Acrux is actually a triple. The main pair, stars A and B, are brilliant blue-white, and separated by 4″. C is nearly 5th magnitude some 90″ away. The widely separated A and C components are visible in 10×50 binoculars, and a 3-inch scope shows the A-B pairing at 70x or more.

And finally, June’s Astronomy Haiku…


Darkness falls later,
Testing stargazers’ patience:
The summer solstice

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[Orion11]

hey kids,

In case anyone didnt get to see the Moon occult Antares last night,
Here are a few shots I got thru my scope.

Before the Occult~


and after~




And a size comparison~ our Sun, Sol, is soo very tiny...

[Dantheman62]

Awesome pics!

[Orion11]

thanks bro!

[taadev]

Thanks to all those that posted these amazing pics!

[iainl140285]

Hey Orion - very cool pics