Astronomy Buff

November 28th, 2007

I Love the Hubble Deep Field

Here’s a great perspective (click on the image to get a larger one that’s easy to read):

The description of the Hubble Space Telescope field of view is perfect. It took more than a week to take the Deep Field though.

Technorati Tags: hubble deep field, hubble space telescope

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By Tony -- 1 comment

June 22nd, 2007

Six Ways Life on Earth Can Be Destroyed by a Nearby Supernova

Having just written this post on Eta Carinae and the possibility of that explosion, some 7,500 light years distant, destroying all life on Earth, I became inspired to write a bit more about this topic.
I should mention that 7,500 light years is a bit far for a supernova to affect us, but under the right […]

By Tony -- 5 comments

June 21st, 2007

Could Eta Carinae Destroy Earth?

Many people have already written about the latest image (pictured here) from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory released yesterday depicting the x-ray emissions produced as material is thrown off of the star and into surrounding gas a dust.
Eta Carinae is an extremely unstable nearby star that is very near its death and because of its mass, […]

By Tony -- 4 comments

May 7th, 2007

The King of all Supernovae

The big news out of NASA today is that the Chandra Observatory recorded the brightest supernova seen so far.
AstroProf has a really good post about it here. He points out out that by bright, we don’t mean the brightest in the sky (those are usually within our own galaxy), rather we mean that this […]

By Tony -- 0 comments

February 27th, 2007

Cool Sky Map Site

I just found this site and have been messing around with it today: skymap.org. It’s an interactive sky map ala Google Maps which allows you to browse the night sky in a pretty trivial manner. It also has a SDSS mode for showing images taken with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
Here’s a […]

By Tony -- 2 comments

February 1st, 2007

Hubble Detects Extrasolar Planet Atmosphere Blowing in the Solar Wind

Some 150 light years away, in the constellation Pegasus, a planet orbits so close to its star that the upper layers of the atmosphere is streaming outward like a comet flying by the Sun. The star is informally known as Osiris, and the planet is fondly known as HD 209458b.
This planet is special […]

By Tony -- 1 comment

January 29th, 2007

If the Sun Stopped Shining Today, We Wouldn’t Know It for 6 Million Years

Remember that scene in Star Trek: Generations, where Malcolm McDowell’s character had access to this giant gun that would stop all fusion processes within a star, causing it to immediately go out? No? Well, umm, he did and uhhh (damn now I gotta explain the whole movie), so umm, let’s just say […]

By Tony -- 3 comments