Lemon Slice Nebula

 
Located in the circumpolar constellation Camelopardalis, IC 3568 is a fairly simple planetary nebula with a tasty name: the Lemon Slice Nebula.

Why is it it called that?

Because it looks like a giant lemon slice floating in the sky, thanks to its uniform spread. The morpohlogy is nearly perfectly sphereical, with a hot super giant in the centre expelling mass, thus creating the lemon slice and what I call 'freshly squeezed juice drops' in a halo around it.

It is a young nebula with only a diameter of .4 light-years, although it dwells about 4500 light years away.

It is about 7.5 degrees away from the North Star currently known as Polaris, and can be seen with a telescope as a faint yellow orb.

APOD 3.6

Comet Lemmon and Comet PanSTARRS (also known as C/2012 F6 and C/2011 L4 respectively) are seen in this image soaring across the skies of the South. Lemmon's ironically lime green coma and slender tail to the left in this frame of a time lapse video from the 12th of February, tracking the motion of this comet compared to other background stars and showing how Lemmon's path has taken it into the same realm as other famous celestial formations, such as the Small Magellanic Cloud and 47 Tuscanae (the globular cluster easily noted on the right side of the image). Within the constellation Microscopium lies PanSTARRS, as it blows through the faint filler formation throughout the video. In the next few months, these comets ought to appear in the skies of the North, where they will appear much more luminous and can be spotted with a pair of binoculars!

George Ellery Hale Cited

"Dr George E Hale, Astronomer Dead." The New York Times Learning Network. New York Times, n.d. Web. http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0629.html.

 

"The Bruce Medalists: George Ellery Hale." The Bruce Medalists: George Ellery Hale. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Feb. 2013. http://www.phys-astro.sonoma.edu/BruceMedalists/Hale/index.html.

 

Hale, George E. The New Heavens. New York: n.p., 1922. Print.

Formation of Stars

Between stars and galaxies, with no radiating visible light, is the Interstellar Medium, which will in parts condense due to some shockwave force in space and thus create fragmented clouds: future stars.

The start of star formation thus means that particles of the ISM are being pulled closer and more compactly together, soon giving off rays that infringe on the visible spectrum and thus make them opaque clouds which are closing in and heating up.

Both stages four and five embody protostars, the begining types of stars just before they become hot enough to fit the definition of a full star. This protostar is a classical T Tauri, fitting the bill of a protostar emmiting large amounts of visible light as its core heats.

Once the protostars are hot enough, they will becoming regular stars, but not fit into the main sequence. Its luminosity will be greater than that of other stars. They will be hotter and expand before they cool a little and conform with the rest of the star body, which is where it will stay for the rest of its stellar life.

APOD 3.5

Within the winter sky's hallmark star, Orion the Hunter, is the intriguing fuzzy patch known as the Great Orion Nebula (or M42). This image is a composite of four colours of infrared light (courtesy of the WISE observatory orbiting the Earth), showing how this nebula bursts with forming stars, all surrounded by heated gas and space dust. Trapezium is a star cluster within the centre of the nebula, and often noted as the source of the Orion Nebula's grand appearance (accompanied by the reflecting dust filemanets which colour the region an eerie green).

APOD3.4

From the Herschel Space Observatory comes this infrared view of the closest galaxy to the Milky Way at only 2.5 million light-years away: the enormous and spiralling Andromeda Galaxy. This island galaxy stranded within the constellation of the Princess--known officially as M31--spans 200 000 light-years across--twice as large as our galaxy. The infrared spectrum reveals shining dust clouds and some areas of ocaque dust, with the red coming from radiating star heat of barely a few tens of degrees above zero and the blue from the hotter central core stars.

Labelled Lunar Landscape

(done to the best of my abilities in Windows95 Paint)

APOD 3.3

Along the snowy scape of Lower Miller Creek, Alaska, the quarter moon with its ethereal halo of ice is guarded by two moondogs, more scientifically known as paraselenae. Much like a parhelion--or sundog--the paraselenae are produced beby the refraction of moonlight through thin, hexagonal plate ice crystals found in high cirrus clouds. These particular paraselenae are faint, for they are better viewed when the moon is closer to the horizon when they are more bright; but it still makes a damn good picture!