The comet is exploding and its coma, a cloud of gas and dust illuminated by the sun, has grown to be bigger than the planet Jupiter.... http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071103/ap_on_sc/brighter_comet
The pictures on this thread are amazing..... some double....but nonetheless awesome. I don't know how many contributors actually are amateur astonomers, but once you've seen an object in real life...... pictures like these mean a lot more. Some of my favorites include M42-The Orion Nebula, M31-Andromeda Galaxy, M33-The Triangulum Galaxy, M1-Supernova remnants (The Crab Nebula), M45-The Pleiades Cluster (Subaru Cluster), M2-A Globular cluster near the constellation Aquarius containing 150,000+ stars..... These are only objects listed in Messier's catalog which goes up to M110 ( I think). Messier worked when technology was obviously nowhere near ours today...... He was a comet hunter in the 1700s that was frustrated he could't find any. So he cataloged several objects he thought looked similar, yet weren't the same. His catalog was ment to be nebulae and clusters...yet many turned out to be galaxies. The New General Catalog (NCG) has 8,000 or so objects in it.... including Messier's and another.... The Index Catalog (IC) that contains only nebulae and clusters. HOwever, the NGC is the most comprehensive, by far. http://seds.org/messier/Messier.html http://www.ngcic.org/dss/dss_messier.asp<<<especially this one http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NGC_objects ^^^^ Check these out!!!!^^^^
i can sit for hours ( and do very often)..and stare at these images.. it's fun to imagine what's out there! It's also like cloud gazing... like this pic below.. i found a little green dude gazing back at me..lol can you make him out?
the bright star on the lower left is actually not a star it's a star that has gone supernova on the outskirts of the galaxy amazing something so far away could be so bright
hope nobody posted this already, but here's a galaxy over 11 billion light years away, dubbed LBG-2377 it's actually 3 galaxies merging together. it's believed that light has been traveling for 11.4 billion years, beginning just a few billion years after the Big Bang when the universe was only 15% of its current age. by comparison, the Earth was formed about 4.5 billion years ago. so, it's giving scientists an unprecedented look at galaxy formation and how the universe has evolved. before this discovery, the farthest known event like this was approximately 9 billion light years away. just fascinating
What's more amazing is that the systems in those galaxies have evolved from that over 11 billion years. Imagine what their civilizations could be possible of?
This video blows my mind [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgg2tpUVbXQ]YouTube - Hubble Deep Field: The Most Imp. Image Ever Taken (Redux)[/ame]
The photo taken of space that covers the largest area contains roughly 10,000 galaxies. This photo took the space telescope 400 orbits around earth to compile, because it covers such a huge area of space. In these galaxies there are anything from 10,000,000 to 10 trillion stars (we simply don't know how many), each one vastly bigger than our measley planet, estimates are that they are on average around 1 million times bigger than earth. That's just the stars, let alone planets etc. Scientists estimate that 90% of space is just that - empty space. So those billions of stars make up less than 10% of that photo. There is vastly more space that it is possible to see, but that's all we've captured in space. then there's the space we can't see, because the light simply won't travel far enough. With the trillions of light years worth of space we can view, it's obviously an infinitely vast place. However, scientists think that if we were to relate the universe to the size of earth, that unimaginably huge area of space we can see would be equivalent to the size of a quarter.(coin not weed. [Wink] ) compared to 'earth'. But anyway, i love looking at these sort of images when high, makes me feel insignificant but allows me to appreciate the beauty of the universe: