APOD 2.5

E.E. Barnard, in the early 1900s, spotted a strange stretch of dark marks east of Scorpio's bright star Antares and in the constellation Ophiucus, behind B59, B72, B77, and B78, the dark nebula known commonly as the "Pipe Nebula" (due to its shape) painted in the stars with interstellar dust. The dense cores (located around 450 light-years away) collapse to form new stars. This picture was taken in the Chilean Atacama Desert with 24 hour exposure and maps out a 10 degree by 10 degree field.

Constellation Quizzes

This index has five different constellation quizzes, one for summer, winter, spring, fall, and on top of that the circumpolar ones!

This one is really interesting too, though it's more recognising elements within the constellations and facts abuot each of them (which is helpful for those little things!)

APOD 2.4

Aloha! Reporting from the North Gemini telescope on Mauna Kea, this is not your regular stock image. Nope, this is NGC 660, floating in over 20 million light-years away within the limits of Pisces, presenting a rather odd appearance. NGC 660 is a polar ring galaxy, meaning that the dust, stars, planets, and so on all orbit around the galactic disc while sectionalised by rings, which in total span over 50 000 light-years. This is a rare moment for a rare sort of galaxy, for some sort of intersection caused a graviational pull that extracted some of the pink of forming stars and threw off the disc's usual configuration, leaving the trail of debris. Though you can't see it, in this picture lies an unseen halo...made of dark matter!

APOD 2.3

This backdrop that looks like a piece pulled from the Star Trek archives is the Spiral Galaxy Arp 188--also known as the Tadpole Galaxy--swirls 420 million light-years away, in the farthest north of the circumpolar dragon, Draco. The blue studded tail itself is 280 light-years in length, legend telling of an intrusive galaxy encountering the Tadpole long ago, disrupting the flow and using its own powerful gravity to lure out trails of dusty clusters, thus forming the tail before leaving. The other galaxy in this tail is the Cartwheel Galaxy, who lies 300 light-years away. Likely, as the galaxy ages, like a frog, the Tadpole will lose its namesake tail, the clusters forming orbiting satellites. Maybe within the next few thousand years, astronomers should consider calling it the Frog Galaxy!

OBS

This morning, beneath the moon, I spotted Venus and just below it Mars, at about 6:45 or so. Orion was clearly visible in the sky, and from his belt I followed and made out a rectangle sort of formation, which I at first wondered whether or not it was the Great Square of Pegasus, only to realise this was a mythical formation of my connect the dots imagination, actually seeing a few bright stars in Puppis and Canis Major.

APOD 2.1

Orion, the Hunter, houses the infamous and easily recognisable Horsehead Nebula, alternatively known as Barnard 33. In the 1800s, this distinct star nursery appeared in a photographic plate, the red colour coming from the hydrogen ionised by the bright Sigma Orionis. Thick dust forms the actual horse head, gas from the nebula funnelled by a strong magnetic field. It takes about 1500 years for light from the Horsehead to reach the Earth, seeing the 'baby pictures' of the bright spots of forming stellar objects.

APOD 2.2

The reflection of nebula VdB 152 (catalogued as CED 201) appears ghostly in the circumpolar constellation of Cepheus. This Halloween spectre (spanning a good 7 light-years) haunts the skies from about 1400 light-years away,  lying along the Northern Milky Way, blocking out the background stars with opaque blue dust clouds, red faintly illumining from the nebular dust around the edges in the ultraviolet spectrum. The cloud's velocity differs from its mother star's, wandering into the realm of the royal for a 2spooky night of tricks and treats.