The Curated Internet

Below are some of the images from the observations made at the Lick Observatory using the Nickel Telescope during October 2018. (1) - M1 (Crab Nebula) (2) - M15 (3) - M16 (Eagle Nebula- Pillars of Creation) (4)&(5) - M17  (Omega Nebula) (6) - M42 (Orion Nebula) (7) - NGC6563 (Cat’s Eye Nebula) (8) - NGC7662 (Snowball Nebula)        

    Waaay back in 1054, a star in the constellation Tauras exploded in a dramatic fashion. The remnant of that massive explosion (supernova) is what we now call the Crab Nebula. But as a result of the explosion, the nebula is still expanding at a rate of over 1,000 kilometers per second. The above gif comparing the nebula in 1950 vs what it was in 1990 is one of the most epic ways to illustrate that fact.  

It can be casual to forget the magnificence of our planet and get lost in our tight-knit everyday lives. In the advent of a lunar eclipse (January 31, 2018 )  it is worth knowing that when it comes to eclipses, Earth holds a pristine status in our solar system.  To understand why, we need to shift our perspective a little bit and ask -”How would it be like if you were on Io (one of the moons of Jupiter) ?”                                            Image source : Deviant art The most startling thing about this experience would be that the Jupiter would appear 36 times larger than the full moon (from earth).  That’s HUGE!   Also since the moons of Jupiter lies in the same plane, you would be witnessing an eclipse every 42 hours …                   Moons - Io, Ganymede, and Callisto in solar eclipse In ...

    As you can see from this dramatic demonstration, the consequence of imparting a rotational velocity to an object is the flattening of object at the poles. The rotational velocity of Earth is a staggering 1,674.4 km/h  and as a result  bulges at the center by a tiny fraction, as is evident from the following image:  

 Image captured on a Samsung galaxy S9 with a 10 second exposure time.  

  "sunspots do not appear at random over the surface of the sun but are concentrated in two latitude bands on either side of the equator. A butterfly diagram (figure attached below) shows the positions of the spots for each rotation of the sun since May 1874 shows that these bands first form at mid-latitudes, widen, and then move toward the equator as each cycle progresses"   -https://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/SunspotCycle.shtml 

 

 A great tool to understand galaxy rotation curves : https://wittman.physics.ucdavis.edu/Animations/RotationCurve/index.html      

 Periods of 25 Variable Stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud -- [ADS link]   Logarithm of the period of the Cephid v/s its corresponding magnitude.