Astronomy

Fireworks Galaxy & Moon + ISS alignment

🙂 I hope you all had lots of fun yesterday while celebrating the coming of 2011. Apparently humans weren’t the only ones playing with fireworks… Here is a picture of some cosmic fireworks. This galaxy was nicknamed the “Fireworks Galaxy” for good reason. Over the last century, at least nine supernovae were discovered in that galaxy. By comparison, the average rate for supernovae in the Milky Way is about 1 per century. A supernova can be brighter than whole galaxies for some time after the explosion. That’s some fireworks!

This beautiful spiral galaxy, also known as NGC 6946, is located 10 million light-years away in the constellation of Cepheus. It is nearly 40,000 light-years across.

Fireworks GalaxyImage Credit & Copyright: Adam Block, Mt. Lemmon SkyCenter, U. Arizona


Also there is something cool that I came across yesterday. It’s the alignment of Earth’s natural and artificial moons (the Moon and the ISS – International Space Station). This is a quite impressive photo! Unfortunately it’s copyrighted, so I can only post a thumbnail with a link to the site where I found it.

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Paul Tomaszewski is a science & tech writer as well as a programmer and entrepreneur. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of CosmoBC. He has a degree in computer science from John Abbott College, a bachelor's degree in technology from the Memorial University of Newfoundland, and completed some business and economics classes at Concordia University in Montreal. While in college he was the vice-president of the Astronomy Club. In his spare time he is an amateur astronomer and enjoys reading or watching science-fiction. You can follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

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