The first identified compact galaxy group,
Archive for » February, 2012 «
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Venus and Jupiter will appear unusually close in the sky over the next month.
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Warning: First, this is a somewhat modified repost from — oddly enough — four years ago. Second, this post has math in it. A lot. Some of it might even be correct. If you are mathophobic, then you might want to skip to the end, where I reveal what Rosebud means.
And for those of you who are incredibly anal, yes, I know I kinda lost track of significant digits about 2/3 of the way through this. I was using a calculator, and just used whatever numbers it gave me to the last decimal place, leaving off for the most part trailing 0s. Sue me. I’m free on February 29th, 4800.
When I was a kid, I had a friend whose birthday was on February 29th. I used to rib him that he was only 3 years old, and he would visibly restrain himself from punching me. Evidently he heard that joke a lot.
Of course, he was really 12. But since February 29th is a leap day, it only comes once every four years.
And why is it only a quadrennial event?
Duh. Astronomy!
The Days of Our Lives
We have two basic units of time: the day and the year. Of all the ...
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Tags: Astronomy, Cool stuff, Leap Day, Leap Year, Time Sink, Top Post Leave a Comment
Venus and Jupiter will appear unusually close in the sky over the next month.
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In early February I posted a gorgeous time lapse video of the night sky in Chile called "Astronomer’s Paradise". One of the astrophotographers who created that video, Christoph Malin, has written an article about what went into making the video, and it’s as complex as you might expect. The article discusses equipment, processing, and the location of the shoot, and yikes, what a haul it must have been! There are gorgeous pictures posted there too, like this one of a laser being used to create an artificial star to improve the telescope’s resolution:
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Tags: Astronomy, Babak Tafreshi, Chile, Christoph Malin, Pretty pictures, time lapse Leave a Comment
This is a galaxy?
Yup. It is! [Click to galactinate.]
This is the dinky Antlia Dwarf Galaxy (located in the southern constellation of Antlia, the "pump"), technically called a dwarf elliptical. It’s so faint and sparse that it wasn’t discovered until 1985 (and confirmed as being a galaxy in 1997), even though it’s only 4 million light years from Earth… not terribly farther than the Andromeda Galaxy, which is so big it’s visible to the naked eye! Antlia may be a member of the Local Group, a loose collection of a few dozen mostly small nearby galaxies; the Milky Way and Andromeda are the two biggest members.
This image is from Hubble, and shows just how dim a bulb this galaxy is. It only has a few million stars in it — our Milky Way has over a hundred billion, by comparison — and it’s only a few thousand light years across. The Milky Way is a full 100,000 light years in diameter, so if you put Antlia next to it you’d probably miss it entirely. Note that in this picture you’re only seeing the brightest stars in Antlia. At ...
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Tags: Antlia, Astronomy, dwarf galaxy, Galaxy, Hubble Space Telescope, NGC 3109, Pretty pictures Leave a Comment
