Galaxies
esiegel | December 30, 2013"Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It's perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we've learned something from yesterday." -John Wayne
There's a lot to look forward to on the precipice of the new year, and many of us will be up until midnight to ring it in. Well, if you're up that late, why not step outside and take a look at one of the deep-sky wonders of the Universe that won't be visible in the early part of the night for months! This Messier Monday, a near-moonless sky will greet you until the pre-dawn twilight, and…
esiegel | December 11, 2013"Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell." -Edna St. Vincent Millay
It was just a little while ago that we were all speculating wildly -- and optimistically -- about Comet ISON, as it plunged towards the Sun from its origins in the very, very distant Solar System. As its perihelion date (the moment of closest approach to the Sun) drew near, you may have noticed something interesting about photos of the comet: it's tail appeared to get longer and longer!
Image credit &…
esiegel | December 9, 2013"The proverb warns that 'You should not bite the hand that feeds you.' But maybe you should, if it prevents you from feeding yourself." -Thomas Szasz
But on this Messier Monday, you're lucky enough that you're about to be introduced to one of the great northern galaxies of the Messier catalogue that is feeding itself! There are 110 deep-sky, non-transient objects that make up the Messier catalogue, and a full 40 of them are galaxies, the most numerous and most distant of all the types of objects catalogued by Messier.
Image credit: Tenho Tuomi of http://www.lex.sk.ca/astro/messier/index2.…
esiegel | November 25, 2013"Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old." -Franz Kafka
The night sky is our window into the Universe beyond the Solar System, and in some cases, even beyond our own galaxy! Perhaps the oldest useful collection of deep-sky objects, the Messier catalogue showcases 110 of the most prominent night sky wonders, a full 42 of which are located beyond our own galaxy. Today, for Messier Monday, let's take a look at one of the true rarities of the Messier catalogue: a globular cluster that's not a part of our own galaxy!
Image credit: Al Kelly of http://www.kellysky.net/; images…
esiegel | November 22, 2013“Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.” -Terry Pratchett
It’s the end of the week once again, and so let's have a go at another Ask Ethan! Perhaps inspired by a great giveaway, there have been so many great questions pouring in (and you can submit yours here for four more chances to win), but this week’s comes from our reader and winner Brad (you owe me your email address, Brad), who asks,
When an object is quoted as being 13.8 billion light years away is that…
esiegel | November 4, 2013"Dream no small dreams, for they have no power to move the hearts of men." -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Welcome back to yet another Messier Monday here on Starts With A Bang! Each Monday, we highlight one of the 110 deep-sky objects that make up the Messier catalogue, showing you where and how to find it in the sky and telling you a bit about the history and the physics/astrophysics behind it. Each one tells its own unique story, and today's distant wonder is no exception.
Image credit: Rich Richins, of all 110 Messier objects (in no particular order).
On a virtually moonless night like…
esiegel | October 28, 2013"I should like to lie at your feet and die in your arms." -Voltaire
Every object that we look at for Messier Monday has its own flavor, its own qualities, and its own unique characteristics. By far the most numerous of the 110 deep-sky objects making up the Messier catalogue are the galaxies, of which there are 40. It's best to observe them on moonless nights, as their surface brightness is spread out across a large area, and even a crescent Moon's presence in the night sky can make all but the brightest of these galaxies invisible to the eye, even in good equipment.
Image credit: Mike Keith…
esiegel | October 7, 2013"The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave." -Patrick Henry
It's not a good idea to showcase a galaxy for you every Messier Monday, considering that even a crescent Moon can render most of them completely unobservable. Now that the autumnal equinox has passed, however, a very special spiral will be visible after sunset for the next six months or so in a relatively nondescript part of the night sky. Out of the 110 deep-sky objects that comprise the Messier catalogue, a full forty of them are galaxies, although today's object wasn't recognized as…
esiegel | September 30, 2013"It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure." -Joseph Campbell
It took Charles Messier and his assistant, Pierre Méchain, a lifetime to scan and survey the sky for all the permanent deep-sky objects visible in their telescopes that could possibly be confused for comets on first class. More than 200 years later, these 110 deep-sky objects are among the best seen and most wondrous sights of the Universe, accessible to anyone with a decent telescope and dark skies. This Messier Monday, let's look the farthest into the…
esiegel | September 18, 2013"A cosmic mystery of immense proportions, once seemingly on the verge of solution, has deepened and left astronomers and astrophysicists more baffled than ever. The crux ... is that the vast majority of the mass of the universe seems to be missing." -William J. Broad
It was in the 1930s, looking at dense clusters of galaxies (like Coma, below), that Fritz Zwicky first noticed that the mass in the Universe didn't add up.
Image credit: Adam Block / Mount Lemmon SkyCenter / University of Arizona.
We knew how gravity worked, so it was pretty straightforward -- based on how the galaxies within…
esiegel | September 5, 2013"One sees qualities at a distance and defects at close range." -Victor Hugo
A couple of weeks ago we took a look at the most distant galaxy (so far) in the known Universe, a galaxy so far away that it takes exclusively infrared observations from our most power space telescopes (Hubble and Spitzer) in order to detect it. What's perhaps even more remarkable is that the light we do detect from it -- the light we detected in the infrared -- was actually emitted in the Ultraviolet part of the spectrum!
Image credit: NASA, ESA, Garth Illingworth (University of California, Santa Cruz) and Rychard…
esiegel | September 2, 2013"We find them smaller and fainter, in constantly increasing numbers, and we know that we are reaching into space, farther and farther, until, with the faintest nebulae that can be detected with the greatest telescopes, we arrive at the frontier of the known universe." -Edwin Powell Hubble
With 110 deep-sky objects scattered throughout the heavens, the Messier Catalogue provides skywatchers across the globe with a number of spectacular targets, from nearby nebulae and clusters to spectacular, distant galaxies. Each Monday, we spotlight a new one right here.
Image credit: Rolando Ligustri,…
esiegel | August 23, 2013“People say sometimes that Beauty is superficial. That may be so. But at least it is not so superficial as Thought is. To me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.” -Oscar Wilde
Beyond the planet Earth, beyond all the stars in the night sky, and beyond the Milky Way galaxy, there's literally an entire Universe out there.
Image credit: R. Jay GaBany, of http://cosmotography.com/.
The farther away we're able to look, the more galaxies we're able to see. As far as our…
esiegel | August 21, 2013"I am undecided whether or not the Milky Way is but one of countless others all of which form an entire system. Perhaps the light from these infinitely distant galaxies is so faint that we cannot see them." -Johann Lambert
When we look out at the Universe, our view is pretty consistently dominated by the stars within our own galaxy. Although we know that many interesting things lie beyond -- globular clusters, individual galaxies, and rich clusters and superclusters of galaxies -- being in the Milky Way makes it very hard to see beyond it.
Image credit: Richard Payne, of Arizona…
esiegel | August 19, 2013"We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows." -Robert Frost
It's time again for another Messier Monday! To kick off each week, we've been taking a look at one of the 110 deep-sky objects that make up the Messier catalogue. Compiled in the 18th Century to help skywatchers avoid these fixed night sky wonders (so that they could better hunt comets), these represent some of the most viewed and easily visible nebulae, star clusters and galaxies visible from our home world.
Image credit: Tenho Tuomi of Tuomi Observatory, via http://rockpoint.dyndns.org/.
An…
esiegel | August 1, 2013“We are not simply in the universe, we are part of it. We are born from it.” -Neil deGrasse Tyson
The story of the Universe is the story of us all; we all share the same cosmic history, coming from a hot, dense state some 13.8 billion years ago known as the Big Bang and emerging after billions of years of cosmic evolution to the Universe we know and love today.
Image credit: ESA and the Planck collaboration.
It's a beautiful story -- and one I've told before -- but it might seem, at least from our perspective, that something is missing from the astrophysicist's version of events. Yes, we…
esiegel | July 29, 2013"Pinwheel, pinwheel spinning around. Look at my Pinwheel and see what I found.
Pinwheel, pinwheel, breezy and bright. Spin me good morning, spin me good night." -Janet Gardner
It's time for another Messier Monday, where each week, one of the 110 deep-sky objects that make up the famed Messier Catalogue -- the first large, accurate catalogue of non-cometary objects -- gets an in-depth treatment. These objects are not only a good representation of the brightest deep-sky objects visible from Earth, they're a good sample of the different types of objects visible from any random location in the…
esiegel | July 24, 2013"But certainly the laser proved to be what I realized it was going to be. At that moment in my life I was too ignorant in business law to be able to do it right, and if I did it over again probably the same damn thing would happen." -Gordon Gould, inventor of the laser
You're used to the iconic image of an observatory's dome surrounded by a dark sky. From within, a telescope peers up at the heavens. And with a huge amount of light-gathering power that dwarfs a fully dilated human eye, we can use this tremendous tool to peek into the dark depths of the Universe.
Image credit: Fort Lewis…
esiegel | July 22, 2013"Most writers spend their lives standing a little apart from the crowd, watching and listening and hoping to catch that tiny hint of despair, that sliver of malice, that makes them think, 'Aha, here is the story.'" -Ayelet Waldman
Welcome back again to another Messier Monday, where we're all set to take an in-depth look at one of the 110 deep-sky wonders that make up the Messier catalogue. Looking at the nearby stellar remnants, star-forming regions and young star clusters, as well as the more distant and larger globular clusters, the most common of all the Messier objects are also the most…
esiegel | July 12, 2013"By denying scientific principles, one can maintain any paradox." -Galileo Galilei
Day and night. It seems like the simplest, most natural thing about our world, that the Sun illuminates one half of the Earth at a time.
Image credit: Public Domain Image from Desktop Wallpaper HD.
While the Earth spins on its axis, orbiting the Sun, roughly half of our lives are spent bathed in the glorious daylight provided by our parent star. The other half is spent in the dark of night, our world illuminated only by the distant stars and galaxies visible from a great distance, along with a few nearby…