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APOD OCTOBER 18th 2016 THE ANTLIA CLUSTER OF GALAXIES Galaxies dot the sky in this impressively wide and deep image of the Antlia Cluster. The third closest cluster of galaxies to Earth after Virgo and Fornax, the Antlia cluster is known for its compactness and its high fraction of elliptical galaxies over (spirals. Antlia, cataloged as Abell S0636, spans about 2 million light years and lies about 130 million light years away toward the constellation of the Air Pump (Antlia). The cluster has two prominent galaxy groups - bottom center and upper left -- among its over 200 galactic members, but no single central dominant galaxy. The vertical red ribbon of gas on the left is thought related to the foreground Antlia supernova remnant and not associated with the cluster. The featured image composite, taken from New Zealand, resulted from 150+ hours of exposures taken over six months. #APOD #apod #october #18th #october18th2016 #flawlessastronomy #flawlessastronomer #astronomy #astronomyislife #loveforastronomy #loveforcosmos #space #intersteller #intergalactic #cluster #galaxy #galaxycluster #antlia #antliacluster #virgo #universe #arnavsingh #thankyou

APOD OCTOBER 8th 2016 MOON, MERCURY AND TWILIGHT RADIO Sharing dawn's twilight with the Moon on September 29, Mercury was about as far from the Sun as it can wander, the innermost planet close to its maximum elongation in planet Earth's skies. In this colorful scene fleeting Mercury is joined by a waning sunlit lunar crescent and earthlit lunar nightside, the New Moon in the Old Moon's arms. Below is the Italian Medicina Radio Astronomical Station near Bologna with a low row of antennae that is part of Italy's first radio telescope array dubbed the "Northern Cross", and a 32-meter-diameter parabolic dish. Of course, moonwatchers won't have to rise in early morning hours on October 8. After sunset the Moon will be high and bright in evening skies, at its first quarter phase for International Observe the Moon Night #moon #earthsatellite #naturalsatellite #apollo #mercury #rockyplanet #small #planet #morningstar #innerplanet #solarsystem #sky #blue #red #horizon #evening #radio #twilight #radiotelescope #telescopes #radioastronomy #loveforastronomy #loveforspace #astronomyislove #astronomyislife #flawlessastronomy #flawlessastronomer #apod #APOD #october8th #october8th2016 #arnavsingh

APOD SEPTEMBER 24th 2016 HEART AND SOUL AND DOUBLE CLUSTER This rich starfield spans almost 10 degrees across the sky toward the northern constellations Cassiopeia and Perseus. On the left, heart-shaped cosmic cloud IC 1805 and IC 1848 are popularly known as the Heart and Soul nebulae. Easy to spot on the right are star clusters NGC 869 and NGC 884 also known as h and Chi Perseii, or just the Double Cluster. Heart and Soul, with their own embedded clusters of young stars a million or so years old, are each over 200 light-years across and 6 to 7 thousand light-years away. In fact, they are part of a large, active star forming complex sprawling along the Perseus spiral arm of our Milky Way Galaxy. The Double Cluster is located at about the same distance as the Heart and Soul nebulae. Separated by only a few hundred light-years, h and Chi Perseii are physically close together, and both clusters are estimated to be about 13 million years old. Their proximity and similar stellar ages suggest both clusters are likely a product of the same star-forming region #astronomy #loveforastronomy #astronomyislife #astronomyislove #space #internebularspace #intersteller #interstellerspace #milkyway #nebulasofmilkyway #nebula #heart #heartnebula #red #rednebula #soul #soulnebula #cluster #interstellarcluster #interstellar #cosmos #loveforcosmos #arnavsingh #flawlessastronomy #follow #100thpost #thankyou #loveforfollowers #keepfollowing

APOD SEPTEMBER 6th 2016 THE WHIRLPOOL GALAXY AND BEYOND Follow the handle of the Big Dipper away from the dipper's bowl, until you get to the handle's last bright star. Then, just slide your telescope a little south and west and you might find this stunning pair of interacting galaxies, the 51st entry in Charles Messier's famous catalog. Perhaps the original spiral nebula, the large galaxy with well defined spiral structure is also cataloged as NGC 5194. Its spiral arms and dust lanes clearly sweep in front of its companion galaxy (left), NGC 5195. The pair are about 31 million light-years distant and officially lie within the angular boundaries of the small constellation Canes Venatici. Though M51 looks faint and fuzzy to the human eye, the above long-exposure, deep-field image taken earlier this year shows much of the faint complexity that actually surrounds the smaller galaxy. Thousands of the faint dots in background of the featured image are actually galaxies far across the universe. #astronomy #loveforastronomy #astronomyislife #space #cosmos #interstellarspace #stars #distantstars #starcluster #galaxy #whirlpoolgalaxy #universe #apod #september6th #flawlessastronomy #arnavsingh #theoreticalastrophysics

#arnavsingh #apod #flawlessastronomy #september6th #space #universe #astronomyislife #loveforastronomy #distantstars #interstellarspace #whirlpoolgalaxy #stars #cosmos #astronomy #starcluster #galaxy #theoreticalastrophysics

APOD SEPTEMBER 5th 2016 SPIRAL METEOR THROUGH HEART NEBULA What is this meteor doing? Dynamically, the unusually short and asymmetric train may indicate that the sand-sized grain at the center of the glow is momentarily spinning as it ablates, causing its path to be slightly spiral. Geographically, the meteor appears to be going through the Heart Nebula, although really it is in Earth's atmosphere and so is about one quadrillion times closer. Taken last month on the night of the peak, this meteor is likely from the Perseid meteor shower. The Perseids radiant, in the constellation of Perseus, is off the frame to the upper right, toward the direction that the meteor streak is pointing. The Heart Nebula was imaged in 18 one-minute exposures, of which the unusual meteor streak appeared on just one. #space #interstellar #interstellarspace #cosmos #gasremnants #nebula #heartnebula #red #meteor #spiralmeteor #green #newbornstars #starcluster #apod #september5th #arnavsingh

#arnavsingh #apod #september5th #space #nebula #interstellar #newbornstars #starcluster #spiralmeteor #interstellarspace #meteor #green #cosmos #gasremnants #heartnebula #red

APOD SEPTEMBER 4th 2016 IO OVER JUPITER FROM VOYAGER 1 Back in 1979, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft flew past Jupiter and its moons. The images in this mosaic, featuring the moon Io against a background of gas giant Jupiter's diffuse swirling cloud bands, were recorded by Voyager's camera from a distance of about 8.3 million kilometers. The Io image from this mosaic may be the first to show curious round features on Io's surface with dark centers and bright rims more than 60 kilometers across. Now known to be volcanic in origin, these features were then thought likely to be impact craters, commonly seen on rocky bodies throughout the Solar System. But as Voyager continued to approach Io, close-up pictures revealed a bizarre world devoid of impact craters, frequently resurfaced by volcanic activity. Earlier this year a new robotic spacecraft, NASA's Juno, began to orbit Jupiter and last week made a pass within 5,000 kilometers of Jupiter's clouds. During the next two years, it is hoped that Juno will discover new things about Jupiter, for example what's in Jupiter's core #astronomy #space #cosmos #solarsystem #gasgiants #jupiter #io #moon #jupitermoons #voyager1 #arnavsingh

#arnavsingh #solarsystem #space #voyager1 #gasgiants #moon #jupitermoons #jupiter #io #cosmos #astronomy

APOD SEPTEMBER 3rd 2016 REUNION ISLAND ECLIPSE The New Moon's dark shadow crossed planet Earth on September 1. In silhouette the Moon didn't quite cover the Sun though, creating an an annular solar eclipse. The shadow's narrow central path was about 100 kilometers wide at maximum eclipse. Beginning in the South Atlantic, it tracked toward the east across Africa, ending in the Indian Ocean. Waiting on the Indian Ocean's Reunion Island, eclipse watchers enjoyed a view just north of the eclipse centerline, the annular phase lasting a few minutes or less. Clouds threaten the nearly eclipsed Sun but create a dramatic sky in this partial phase snapshot from the northern side of the 50 kilometer #astronomy #astronomypictureoftheday #space #eclipse #island #APOD #solareclipse #clouds #arnavsingh

#arnavsingh #astronomypictureoftheday #clouds #space #island #solareclipse #eclipse #apod #astronomy

APOD SEPTEMBER 2nd 2016 LITTLE PLANET ASTRO CAMP Day and night on this little planet look a lot like day and night on planet Earth. In fact, the images used to construct the little planet projection, a digitally warped and stitched mosaic covering 360x180 degrees, were taken during day and night near Tarján, Hungary, planet Earth. They span a successful 33-hour-long photo experiment at July's Hungarian Astronomical Association Astro Camp. The time-series composite follows the solar disk in 20 minute intervals from sunrise to sunset and over six hours of star trails in the northern night sky centered on the North Celestial Pole near bright star Polaris. The orbiting International Space Station traced the offset arc across the northern night

APOD SEPTEMBER 1st 2016 LIGHT AT THE END OF THE ROAD The bright light at the end of this country road is actually a remarkably close conjunction of two planets. After sunset on August 27 brilliant Venus and Jupiter almost appear as a single celestial beacon in the night skyscape taken near Lake Wivenhoe, Queensland, Australia. A spectacular vertical panorama from the southern hemisphere, it shows the central Milky Way near zenith, posed on top of a pillar of Zodiacal light along the ecliptic plane. Of course Mars and Saturn are near the ecliptic too, just below the galaxy's central bulge. Above and left of a tree on the horizon, fleeting planet Mercury also adds to the light at the end of the road

APOD AUGUST 31st 2016 ANNULAR SOLR ECLIPSE OVER NEW MEXICO What is this person doing? In 2012 an annular eclipse of the Sun was visible over a narrow path that crossed the northern Pacific Ocean and several western US states. In an annular solar eclipse, the Moon is too far from the Earth to block out the entire Sun, leaving the Sun peeking out over the Moon's disk in a ring of fire. To capture this unusual solar event, an industrious photographer drove from Arizona to New Mexico to find just the right vista. After setting up and just as the eclipsed Sun was setting over a ridge about 2.5 kilometers away, a person unknowingly walked right into the shot. Although grateful for the unexpected human element, the photographer never learned the identity of the silhouetted interloper. It appears likely, though, that the person is holding a circular device that would enable them to get their own view of the eclipse. The shot was taken at sunset on 2012 May 20 at 7:36 pm local time from a park near Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA. Tomorrow another annular solar eclipse will become visible, this time along a path crossing Africa and Madagascar

APOD AUGUST 30th 2016 AURORA OVER ICELANDIC FAULT Admire the beauty but fear the beast. The beauty is the aurora overhead, here taking the form of great green spiral, seen between picturesque clouds with the bright Moon to the side and stars in the background. The beast is the wave of charged particles that creates the aurora but might, one day, impair civilization. Exactly this week in 1859, following notable auroras seen all across the globe, a pulse of charged particles from a coronal mass ejection (CME) associated with a solar flare impacted Earth's magnetosphere so forcefully that they created the Carrington Event. A relatively direct path between the Sun and the Earth might have been cleared by a preceding CME. What is sure is that the Carrington Event compressed the Earth's magnetic field so violently that currents were created in telegraph wires so great that many wires sparked and gave telegraph operators shocks. Were a Carrington-class event to impact the Earth today, speculation holds that damage might occur to global power grids and electronics on a scale never yet experienced. The featured aurora was imaged last week over Thingvallavatn Lake in Iceland, a lake that partly fills a fault that divides Earth's large Eurasian and North American

APOD AUGUST 29th 2016 YOUNG SUNS OF NGC: 7219 Young suns still lie within dusty NGC 7129, some 3,000 light-years away toward the royal constellation Cepheus. While these stars are at a relatively tender age, only a few million years old, it is likely that our own Sun formed in a similar stellar nursery some five billion years ago. Most noticeable in the sharp image are the lovely bluish dust clouds that reflect the youthful starlight. But the compact, deep red crescent shapes are also markers of energetic, young stellar objects. Known as Herbig-Haro objects, their shape and color is characteristic of glowing hydrogen gas shocked by jets streaming away from newborn stars. Paler, extended filaments of reddish emission mingling with the bluish clouds are caused by dust grains effectively converting the invisible ultraviolet starlight to visible red light through photoluminesence. Ultimately the natal gas and dust in the region will be dispersed, the stars drifting apart as the loose cluster orbits the center of the Galaxy. The processing of this remarkable composite image has revealed the faint red strands of emission at the upper right. They are recently recognized as a likely supernova remnant and are currently being analyzed by Bo Reipurth (Univ. Hawaii) who obtained the image data at the Subaru telescope. At the estimated distance of NGC 7129, this telescopic view spans over 40 light-years

APOD AUGUST 28th 2016 ABELL 370: GALAXY CLUSTER GRAVITATIONAL LENS What is that strange arc? While imaging the cluster of galaxies Abell 370, astronomers had noted an unusual arc to the right of many cluster galaxies. Although curious, one initial response was to avoid commenting on the arc because nothing like it had ever been noted before. In the mid-1980s, however, better images allowed astronomers to identify the arc as a prototype of a new kind of astrophysical phenomenon -- the gravitational lens effect of entire cluster of galaxies on background galaxies. Today, we know that this arc actually consists of two distorted images of a fairly normal galaxy that happened to lie far behind the huge cluster. Abell 370's gravity caused the background galaxies' light -- and others -- to spread out and come to the observer along multiple paths, not unlike a distant light appears through the stem of a wine glass. In mid-July of 2009, astronomers used the then just-upgraded Hubble Space Telescope to image Abell 370 and its gravitational lens images in unprecedented detail. Almost all of the yellow images featured here are galaxies in the Abell 370 cluster. An astute eye can pick up many strange arcs and distorted arclets, however, that are actually images of more distant galaxies. Studying Abell 370 and its images gives astronomers a unique window into the distribution of normal and dark matter in galaxy clusters and the universe

APOD AUGUST 26th 2016 THE MILKY WAY SETS Under dark skies the setting of the Milky Way can be a dramatic sight. Stretching nearly parallel to the horizon, this rich, edge-on vista of our galaxy above the dusty Namibian desert stretches from bright, southern Centaurus (left) to Cepheus in the north (right). From early August, the digitally stitched, panoramic night skyscape captures the Milky Way's congeries of stars and rivers of cosmic dust, along with colors of nebulae not readily seen with the eye. Mars, Saturn, and Antares, visible even in more luminous night skies, form the the bright celestial triangle just touching the trees below the galaxy's central bulge. Of course, our own galaxy is not the only galaxy in the scene. Two other major members of our local group, the Andromeda Galaxy and the Triangulum Galaxy, lie near the right edge of the frame, beyond the arc of the setting of Milky Way.

APOD AUGUST 28th 2016 CLOSEST STAR HAS POTENTIALLY HABITABLE PLANET The star closest to the Sun has a planet similar to the Earth. As announced yesterday, recent observations confirmed that this planet not only exists but inhabits a zone where its surface temperature could allow liquid water, a key ingredient for life on Earth. It is not yet known if this planet, Proxima b, has any life. Even if not, its potential ability to sustain liquid water might make it a good first hop for humanity's future trips out into the Milky Way Galaxy. Although the planet's parent star, Proxima Centauri, is cooler and redder than our Sun, one of the other two stars in the Alpha Centauri star system is very similar to our Sun. The featured image shows the sky location of Proxima Centauri in southern skies behind the telescope that made many of the discovery observations: ESO's 3.6-meter telescope in La Silla, Chile. The discovered planet orbits close in -- so close one year there takes only 11 days on Earth. The planet was discovered by the ESO's Pale Red Dot collaboration. Although seemingly unlikely, if Proxima b does have intelligent life, at 4.25 light years distance it is close enough to Earth for two-way

APOD AUGUST 23rd 2016 GIGANTIC JET LIGHTNING OVER CHINA That's no meteor. While watching and photographing this year's Perseid Meteor Shower, something unexpected happened: a gigantic jet erupted from a nearby cloud. The whole thing was over in a flash -- it lasted less than a second -- but was fortunately captured by an already-recording digital camera. Gigantic jets are a rare form of lightning recognized formally only a few years ago. The featured high resolution color image, taken near the peak of Shikengkong mountain in China, may be the best image yet of this unusual phenomena. The same event appears to have been captured simultaneously by another photographer, further away. The gigantic jet appears to start somewhere in a nearby thundercloud and extend upwards towards Earth's ionosphere. The nature of gigantic jets and their possible association with other types of Transient Luminous Events (TLEs) such as blue jets and red sprites remains an active topic of research

APOD AUGUST 22nd 2016 TUTULEMMA: SOLAR ECLIPSE ANALEMMA If you went outside at exactly the same time every day and took a picture that included the Sun, how would the Sun's position change? With great planning and effort, such a series of images can be taken. The figure-8 path the Sun follows over the course of a year is called an analemma. At the Winter Solstice in Earth's northern hemisphere, the Sun appears at the bottom of the analemma. Analemmas created from different latitudes appear at least slightly different, as well as analemmas created at a different time each day. With even greater planning and effort, the series can include a total eclipse of the Sun as one of the images. Pictured is such a total solar eclipse analemma or Tutulemma - a term coined by the photographers based on the Turkish word for eclipse. The featured composite image sequence was recorded from Turkey starting in 2005. The base image for the sequence is from the total phase of a solar eclipse as viewed from Side, Turkey on 2006 March 29. Venus was also visible during totality, toward the lower right. If you want to create your own USA-based tutulemma ending at next August's total solar eclipse, now would be good time to start

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