Jason Nishiyama @evilscientistca@octodon.social
Teacher, astronomer, political scientist and father.
M57 - The Ring Nebula - is one of only 4 planetary nebulae on Messier's famous list.
The Earth wobbles on its axis, with the axis describing a circle on the celestial sphere about once every 26000 years. One upshot of this is that the pole star slowly changes over time. Right now it's Polaris, in about 8000 years from now it will be Deneb, in 12000 years Vega.
@tiana_athriel @DialMforMara
Indeed! <waves>
Sun spot number is often used as a proxy for solar energy output as the Sun’s output tracks the SSN reasonably well.
Sunspots are cooler areas on the Sun's surface where the Sun's magnetic field becomes twisted. Sunspots occur in 11 year cycles and are an indicator of solar activity.
The Sun. The dot is the Earth to scale.
@timgrindall it gets the job done 😉
Now the Moon looks a bit monochrome, shades of grey, however if you exaggerate the colour in Photoshop you can see that different regions have different colours.
The Moon from last night. RGB image from 11 each R,G, and B images at 1/1000s exposure. 0.2m f3.9 Newtonian telescope.
Open clusters are groups of stars that were formed together in the more recent past. They are just now beginning to spread out into the Galaxy. (M11-Wild Duck cluster shown)
The Sun gets it's energy from hydrogen atoms in its core being forced together to form helium atoms. During the reaction a small amount of the mass is converted into energy.
M78 is a nebula in Orion. It is a reflection nebula, that is we see it because it is reflecting light from some nearby stars. As the gas and dust of the nebula preferentially reflect blue light the nebula appear bluish.
M42 - the Great Nebula in Orion is a large star formation region. It is fairly close, only about 1500 ly away.
The iron in iron meteorites was forged in the cores of massive stars. The meteorite itself is a remnant of the iron core from either a planetesimal or planet that formed in the early solar system that was then destroyed by a collision.
DUCK! M31 - the Andromeda Galaxy - is heading towards our own Galaxy and will collide with us in about 4 billion years.
@Jehu@anarchism.space They are indeed farther apart than they appear. Using the plate I showed I measured a couple of the stars closer to the middle. Assuming they're in the same plane (which their not so we will underestimate their separation) they're a little over 7 arc seconds apart. For a 12000 pc distance that puts them 1.5 ly apart.
Now the reverse. Time lapse of yesterday's snowfall reversing the previous couple of days melt...
https://youtu.be/KOlQGzTvktw
@Jehu@anarchism.space they should be able to see out.
The lunar surface has more craters than the Earth because on Earth weather and geological processes erase craters in relatively short order.
