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Known since antiquity to cultures the world over, and containing over 1,000 members, the Pleiades star cluster is a prominent winter target in the Northern hemisphere, and summer target in the Southern hemisphere. Dominated by young, hot blue stars, the cluster is about 440 ly away from Earth. Nine of [...]
The sun is getting active again so it’s time to be watching for the aurora. Yesterday I was all excited because conditions were right to be able to see an aurora from here. That was until it got dark and the conditions went to the devil. Oh well, at least there is progress.
Oops, almost forgot [...]
Moonrise over Bristol 27 May 2010. [Click for full size] Credit: Will Gater Last night there was a lovely moonrise (image above) over Bristol. The conditions were relatively good for viewing it too, as there was only a small amount of low-level haze and not too much cloud around. It appears that wonderful orange/red colour [...]
Voyager 2 was launched on August 20, 1977 and has since traveled 8,600 million miles from mother Earth.
The four-year mission to Saturn has lasted 33 years and Voyager 2 enjoys the distinction of being one of two man-made objects at the very edge of the solar system. Voyager 1 is a little further out than [...]
…and it’s about time! Seemed like we were heading into another Maunder Minimum there for a while. Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating a little, but we did go through a long stretch of time when we should have been seeing sunspots and we were not.
So what? It’s not like sunspots do anything, [...]
NASA / CXC / Penn State / STScI / UIUC
This image of the supernova remnant N49 combines optical observations (in yellowand white) with an X-ray view (in blue). Labels indicate the supernova point source toward the upper left as well as a speeding "bullet" of debris at lower right.
The stringy leftovers of a stellar explosion in the Large Magellanic Cloud make up one of the most photogenic blast scenes in our cosmic neighborhood. In the past, astronomers have used the Hubble Space Telescope and the 
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McDonald Observatory / U. Texas
Click for video: A graphic shows the star Upsilon Andromedae with lines tracing the orbits of three planets. Two of the outer planets have orbits that appear to be inclined about 30 degrees with respect to each other, astronomers say. Click on the image to watch an animation.
For decades, Pluto has been seen as an oddball in the planetary tribe - in part because its orbit was so much more eccentric and
Appearing more like detached bits of the Milky Way, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are irregular dwarf galaxies thought to be orbiting the Milky Way. Members of our Local Group, the Clouds are being pulled and distorted by the Milky Way.
The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is about 1/10th as large as [...]
A stunning noctilucent cloud display seen in the summer of 2009. Credit: Will Gater It’s approaching that time of year when the skies of the northern hemisphere are graced by an ethereal phenomenon known as noctilucent clouds (or NLCs). These high altitude clouds of ice crystals shine long after the Sun has set and are [...]