Transcript Montage of Jupiter and the Galilean satellites

Galileo Galilei
• Galileo's telescope
Middle Finger of Galileo's Right Hand
Montage of Jupiter and the Galilean satellites: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and
Callisto. Images acquired by Voyager 1 spacecraft.
[http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/photo_gallery]
Voyager 1 Montage of Saturn and several of its satellites:
Dione, Tethys, Mimas, Enceladus, Rhea, and Titan.
[http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/photo_gallery]
A Solar Prominence Erupts
Credit: SOHO - EIT Consortium, ESA, NASA
Last year, our Sun went though Solar Maximum, the time in its 11-year
cycle where the most sunspots and explosive activities occur. Sunspots,
the Solar Cycle, and solar prominences are all caused by the Sun's
changing magnetic field. Pictured above is a solar prominence that
erupted on May 15, throwing electrons and ions out into the Solar
System. The image was taken in the ultraviolet light emitted by a
specific type of ionized helium, a common element on the Sun.
Particularly hot areas appear in white, while relatively cool areas appear
in red. Our Sun should gradually quiet down until Solar Minimum
occurs in 2007.
2001 September 24
One of the images of the surface of Venus obtained by the Magellan
spacecraft. Lava flows extend for hundreds of kilometers across the
fractured plains shown in the foreground, to the base of Maat Mons,
a 5 mile high volcano. [http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/photo_gallery]
Charles R. Munnerlyn changed the world’s concept of vision when he designed the first
digital device for automatically determining refractive errors in the human eye. Known
as one of the founding fathers of laser vision correction, he ushered in one of the
fastest growing surgeries performed in the United States – used on more than 1.4
million eyes in 2001 alone. That first invention also ushered in Munnerlyn’s
entrepreneurial spirit. After years of toil and millions of dollars in investments, he and a
small group of engineering and medical colleagues founded VISX, a company that is
now the world’s largest manufacturer of laser-based vision correction systems.
Textbook:
Foundations of Astronomy (Paperback)
by Michael A. Seeds
http://www.amazon.com:
25 used & new available from $7.25
Paperback: 656 pages
Publisher: Thomson Brooks/Cole; 6th edition (July 2000)
ISBN: 0534378552
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Hubble Space Telescope (HST) being refurbished. Astronauts Story Musgrave and
Jeffrey
Hoffman are seen, with Australia's west coast in the background.
Hertzsprung-Russell diagram
Picture from ASTRONOMY: THE EVOLVING UNIVERSE
sixth edition
Credit: Michael Zeilik
The horizontal axis is surface temperature; the vertical one,
luminosity, in units of the SunΥsluminosity. The solid white lin es show
where stars of different luminosity classes fall on the diagram;
supergiants at the very top; giants just below them; and finally mainsequence stars. The relative sizes of the stars are shown correctly within
each luminosity class, but not between them. The colors are those as
perceived by the eye looking at these stars through a telescope.
The Crab Nebula from VLT
Credit: FORS Team, 8.2-meter VLT, ESO
The Crab Nebula, filled with mysterious filaments, is the result of a
star that was seen to explode in 1054 AD. This spectacular supernova
explosion was recorded by Chinese and (quite probably) Anasazi
Indian astronomers. The color indicates what is happening to the
electrons in different parts of the Crab Nebula. Red indicates the
electrons are recombining with protons to form neutral hydrogen,
while blue indicates the electrons are whirling around the magnetic
field of the inner nebula. In the nebula's very center lies a pulsar: a
neutron star rotating, in this case, 30 times a second.
November 22, 1999
M16: Stars from Eagle's EGGs
Credit: J. Hester, P. Scowen (ASU), HST, NASA
Newborn stars are forming in the Eagle Nebula. This image, taken with
the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995, shows evaporating gaseous
globules (EGGs) emerging from pillars of molecular hydrogen gas and
dust. The giant pillars are light years in length and are so dense that
interior gas contracts gravitationally to form stars. At each pillars'
end, the intense radiation of bright young stars causes low density
material to boil away, leaving stellar nurseries of dense EGGs exposed.
The Eagle Nebula, associated with the open star cluster M16, lies
about 7000 light years away.
2000 September 24