APOD 2.3

This picture "Meteor Between the Clouds" caught my interest for several reasons. First of all, meteors and comets have always been of great interest to me in the Astronomical realm. It is for this reason that I picked Comets and Meteors as my topic of choice for this quarter's Astronomy Project, which we have to make a multimedia presentation on. Thus it is to my advantage to examine and research all sorts of information about comets and meteors, which this article provides a wealth of. Also the picture and relevant article is quite intriguing because the picture taken is of a meteor that was sighted during the Leonid Meteor Shower that happened earlier this week and my class stayed up late to view. I did not attend the observation session, however this picture makes me wish that I had been there for it. While reading the article that goes along with the picture, I also learned that the Leonid Meteor shower is caused by Comet Tempel-Tuttle.

Nightly Observations 2.1

For the past week or two, I have been able to consistently observe the night sky from around 7-11 in the evening. Variation in observation time occurs as it is not static when I find myself outside, and I then take a chance to look around and see what is taking place in the sky. I have noticed however that the Moon has been particularly bright of late, as the cold nights and little cloud cover have made conditions quite perfect. The Southeastern portion of the sky always appears to be the brightest and littered with most stars, with a deal of scattering in the Southwest as well. Specifically the 'Belt' in the constellation Orion has been consistently observable in the sky. Tonight however is a different story. The Moon is not visible at all, most likely it is sunken below the horizon, and the Southeast portion of the sky is blank of stars. I have no clue as to why I am not able to see any stars at 8 at night, and it is puzzling me to no end. However this lack of stars has brought something to my notice in the Southwest. There is a very bright celestial object high in the Southwest, brighter than anything in the sky currently. I do not know what exactly this bright object is, but most likely I would guess that it is a planet, as stars are not usually so bright and unique in the sky like this.

APOD 2,2

This picture, 'Young Stars in the Rho Ophiuchi Cloud' caught my eye straight off for several reasons. The picture contains very vibrant colors and a wide range of hues, some of which include purple and pinkish pinpricks of light which are in fact stars. This coloration is due to the fact that the picture was taken in infrared wavelengths. More specifically the infrared wavelengths are produced by the heat from newborn stars, which heats up surrounding gas and hydrogen molecules and produces the aforementioned glow. This is also a quite interesting picture, because it deals with the constellation Ophiuchus, the nearest star-forming region, which we have been quizzed on for weeks on end in our Constellation Quizzes. While perusing the embedded links, I learned that this region of Ophiuchus is constantly forming stars, specifically 300 newborn stars which are 'newly' formed, only 300,000 years old. This is rather young for a star though, seeing as our Sun is 5 billion years old.

APOD 2.1

This picture "Reflection Nebula in Cepheus" is particularly interesting to me for several reasons. Foremost among these, is the fact that it depicts a very peculiar phenomenon in space, which is an 'dusty curtain' in space. This is created by large pockets of interstellar dust in the area which block light from background stars. The curtain also scatters light given off by a star in the nebula, that is part of the constellation Cepheus, which gives the edges of the phenomenon a bluish tint. The curtain itself is almost 1,400 light years away in the constellation Cepheus. This fact makes the picture just that more interesting to me, considering that we have been studying and identifying the constellation Cepheus for weeks now in our Constellation Quizzes. While perusing the relevant links in the article, I discovered that the 'dusty curtain' is in fact a type of nebula known as a reflection nebula, and that they actually move around through space.