APOD 4.5

The Antennae
2011 April 29th

This object resides in Corvus which was one of the two constellations of the week. How coincidental.  About 60 million light years away, two galaxies collided and resulted in this.  The two stars in the respective galaxies did not collide however but there atmospheres and dust did creating an extremely prolific star formation area.  Again, this object is named the Antennae for obvious reasons and the picture illustrates just how strong gravitational tidal forces are.  The objects surrounding the Antennae have been formed and thrown away from the galaxies. Awesome.

Zooniverse

I logged two more hours on Moon Zoo this week.

APOD 4.4

Cat's Eye Nebula
2011 April 24

First of all I think this is the most appropriately named object thus far.  It looks exactly like its name, which is cool.  Secondly, this nebula is awesome! It looks stunningly different from others due to its translucent nature and bluish-pinkish hue. What a fascinating picture.  This nebula occurs three thousand light years from Earth.  It spans half a light year in size and represents the final phase of a sun-like stars life.  This very well may be what our Sun will look like in 5 billion years.

Also, Lord of the Rings?

Zooniverse

I'm hooked on exploring the surface of the moon. I find it very interesting and entertaining. This will be the project I focus most on. I spent two hours last week on it.

APOD 4.3

Sunspot Loops in Ultraviolet
2011 April 10

This picture is a pretty good illustration of how violent our Sun is.  Imagining all of the activity that is occuring on our Sun right now is awesome.  This picture beautifully depicts the extraordinarily hot sunspots on the sun.  It is said to be over one million degrees Celsius.  This number means nothing to me.  I can't even imagine what that means but whatever it means, it's fascinating.

APOD 4.2

Messier 101
2011 April 15

This is a sprial galaxy found as an M object in the direction of Ursa Major. As is apparent in almost every astronomy of the day picture this photograph is stunningly beautiful.  To think that there are an almost infinite number of these galaxies in our universe really starts to hurt my mind.  This is one of the last entries into Messier's catalog of objects in the sky.  This galaxy is almost twice the size of our own Milky Way galaxy. It's pictures like this that do more to prove the existence of life on other planets than anything a scientist has found thus far.  Just by sheer probability, I feel life does exist.  Maybe that life exists in this pictured spiral galaxy.

Zooooooooooooniverse

I spent two hours this week really exploring the different things I can do on Zooniverse. My favorite so far has been the Moon Zoo which intrigued me most.  The Milky Way Galaxy exploration was interesting also.

APOD 4.1

Planetary Nebula NGC 2438
2011 April 7th

This is a planetary nebulae. This picture is obviously very aesthetically appealing and is very intriguing just after looking at it. However, it is even cooler to know that the reason it looks like this is because this star much like our sun has been existing for so long that is has run out of hydrogen at its core.  It's cool to extrapolate that data and move the information to our sun where this process will occur eventually. (Hopefully by then we'll be living in other galaxies and planets...Haha.) Still, this is part of a stars life and turns out to be a very beautiful one! This occurs in a relatively young star cluster M46 which is found in Puppis.