05-11-2012, 06:03 AM
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#109
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Join Date: Nov 2007
Location: I live in the last place where you Look.
Age: 31
Posts: 7,376
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Re: Terry's Astronomy Thread.
What's in the sky tonight?
May 11, 2012
-Brilliant Venus is dropping lower in the west-northwest every evening this month. A telescope shows it enlarging and waning in phase, as shown here; it's swinging ever closer to the line between us and the Sun. Look a little to its right for the much fainter star Beta Tauri. As of tonight the planet and star are 1½° apart.
Astro Picture of the Day:
May 11, 2012
Source:
NGC 3314 is actually two large spiral galaxies which just happen to almost exactly line up. The foreground spiral is viewed nearly face-on, its pinwheel shape defined by young bright star clusters. But against the glow of the background galaxy, dark swirling lanes of interstellar dust appear to dominate the face-on spiral's structure. The dust lanes are surprisingly pervasive, and this remarkable pair of overlapping galaxies is one of a small number of systems in which absorption of light from beyond a galaxy's own stars can be used to directly explore its distribution of dust. NGC 3314 is about 140 million light-years (background galaxy) and 117 million light-years (foreground galaxy) away in the multi-headed constellation Hydra. The background galaxy would span nearly 70,000 light-years at its estimated distance. A synthetic third channel was created to construct this dramatic new composite of the overlapping galaxies from two color image data in the Hubble Legacy Archive.
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