Month: September 2015

13 September 2015 partial solar eclipse

The partial solar eclipse taking place on Sunday 13 September will be visible from southern Africa (southwards from southern Angola, Zambia, Malawi, southern Mocambique and southern Madagascar), the southern Atlantic and Indian Oceans, and Antarctica. As it will be easier to observe the eclipse the closer to the South Pole one is, the far south …

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Crash Course Astronomy: White Dwarfs and Planetary Nebulae

One of my favorite planetary nebulae in the sky, Sh2-68, aka The Flaming Skull Nebula. Photo by T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage) and H. Schweiker (WIYN and NOAO/AURA/NSF) I’ll be honest: Every episode of Crash Course Astronomy has been fun to write, edit, and shoot. They all really have. But the past few episodes, …

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The Cosmic Butterfly Of Death

This is an image of the Twin Jet planetary nebula. NASA/ESA/Hubble/Judy Schmidt Two dying stars are in a dance of death in this spectacular image of the Twin Jet planetary nebula. The butterfly shape is created by the stellar ballet of the two sun-like stars at the end of their lives. The primary star of …

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Stunning deep space photo reveals new details of Orion nebulae

High resolution image of Messier 43 taken with the 6.5 meter Magellan telescope in Chile and the MMIRS, which sees into the near-infrared spectrum. (Image by Yuri Beletsky and Igor Chilingarian) Recently crowned the “astronomy photo of the year” by Slate’s Bad Astronomy blog, a new image of a region of Orion’s belt reveals the …

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Astronomers unravel the history of galaxies for the first time

Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration A team of international scientists, led by astronomers from Cardiff University’s School of Physics and Astronomy, has shown for the first time that galaxies can change their structure over the course of their lifetime. By observing the sky as it is today, and peering back in …

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