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Rob Knop's Blog -- ramblings and rants about astronomy, cosmology, science education, general nerdism, and anything else.
Rob Knop earned a PhD in Physics from Caltech in 1997, and did a 5-year post-doc with the Supernova Cosmology Project, and contributed to the discovery of the accelerating Universe. He was an assistant professor of Physics & Astronomy at Vanderbilt for 6 years before scattering out of academia. He now works for Linden Lab, the producers of Second LIfe. (Note: this is not an official site of Linden Lab! Although I work for Linden Lab, all content in this blog is posted without the review or approval of Linden Lab. All statements and opinions expressed here are my own.)
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Category: Pretty Pictures
NGC 7331 is a spiral galaxy, probably not too dissimilar from our own (except that it lacks a bar), which is relatively nearby. (At a mere 49 million light-years, it's not in our own back yard, but it's just down...
Posted by Rob Knop at 1:29 PM • 7 Comments •
Category: Astronomy Science
NGC 5135 is a barred spiral, similar in some ways to NGC 1365. Both galaxies are members of the IRAS "Bright Galaxy Sample," meaning that they are very luminous in the infrared as a result of vigorous star-forming activity. Both have very...
Posted by Rob Knop at 11:12 AM • 7 Comments •
Category: Pretty Pictures
The image below is an image taken in 1994 with the Hubble Space telescope of galaxy NGC 4526: Image: NASA, ESA, The Hubble Key Project Team, and The High-Z Supernova Search Team The bright spot in the lower left is the...
Posted by Rob Knop at 12:19 PM • 4 Comments •
Category: Astronomy Science
VV114 is a very interesting galaxy. It's a major merger of at least two big galaxies. If I might go out on a limb, it may even be an advanced merger (on the left) currently strongly interacting with another galaxy...
Posted by Rob Knop at 1:37 PM • 2 Comments •
Category: Astronomy Science
Are you ready for this? This week's Friday Galaxy is Mk509: DSS2 image from Skyview Admittedly, the image of this galaxy does not rank very high on the "wow, what a cool and pretty looking galaxy" scale. However, this is...
Posted by Rob Knop at 2:52 PM • 4 Comments •
Category: Pretty Pictures
Here are images of two more galaxies. These weren't taken during the current run, but in a previous run. Last November, I was also down at CTIO with some students. I was doing blazar work on the 1.0m telescope (not...
Posted by Rob Knop at 9:17 PM • 5 Comments •
Category: Pretty Pictures
I apologize for my silence of the last few weeks; real life gets busy at times. This time, I was in a crunch finishing up things before running off to an observing run at the CTIO Observatory in Chile. That's...
Posted by Rob Knop at 11:10 PM • 18 Comments •
Category: Pretty Pictures
M82 is a galaxy that's relatively near to the Milky Way. It's not in our own local group, but it's in a nearby group of galaxies (the "M81 group"), and is only about 12 million light-years away (which is close...
Posted by Rob Knop at 1:51 PM • 11 Comments •
Category: Pretty Pictures
This is an image of NGC 6744, taken with the South African Large Telescope. NGC 6744 is a classic spiral galaxy, and appears similar to how the Milky Way would look if we were able to get outside of the...
Posted by Rob Knop at 9:02 AM • 6 Comments •
Category: Pretty Pictures
This is really what the sky looks like if you go out side at the right time of night and the right time of year at the CTIO observatory in Chile.
Posted by Rob Knop at 11:34 AM • 16 Comments •
Tim Lambert 11.22.2009
PZ Myers 11.22.2009
PZ Myers 11.19.2009
Ed Brayton 11.22.2009
Ed Brayton 11.19.2009
