metallicity
esiegel | August 12, 2013"There is an ancient saying among men that you cannot thoroughly understand the life of mortals before the man has died, then only can you call it good or bad." -Sophocles
Imagine looking up at the night sky -- able to survey the full depths of space -- with eyes the size of saucers instead of our paltry, few-millimeter-sized pupils. What do you suppose you'd see? Well, here on Messier Monday, we take a journey through the first catalogue to effectively do just that! Charles Messier catalogued, over many years in the late 18th Century, 110 deep-sky objects, each unique, and each telling its…
esiegel | June 17, 2013“God put me on this earth to accomplish a certain number of things. Right now I am so far behind that I will never die.” -Bill Watterson
Welcome back to another Messier Monday, only here on Starts With A Bang! With each new Monday, we take an in-depth look at a prominently visible random object from Messier's catalogue of 110 deep-sky curiosities, objects that range from stellar corpses to star-forming regions, to open clusters, globular clusters, distant galaxies, and even a few anomalies!
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons users Jim Cornmell and Zeimusu.
The objects in Messier's catalogue…
esiegel | April 22, 2013"[T]he entire globe will soon be wrapped in a glowing envelope through which none of the magic of the Universe can be seen by the naked eye." -George Eslinger
Welcome to still another Messier Monday here on Starts With A Bang! Each Monday, we highlight a different one of the 110 deep-sky objects that make up the Messier Catalogue, the first accurate catalogue of more than 100 extended, deep-sky wonders strewn across the expansive night sky!
Image credit: ScienceSouth -- Tony's Astronomy Corner.
Tonight, the Moon is nearly full, which means the largest natural source of light pollution at…
esiegel | December 26, 2012"We have been forced to admit for the first time in history not only the possibility of the fact of the growth and decay of the elements of matter. With radium and with uranium we do not see anything but the decay. And yet, somewhere, somehow, it is almost certain that these elements must be continuously forming. They are probably being put together now in the laboratory of the stars." -Robert Millikan
The Universe has been around for a long time, but without the Big Bang, we'd never have any of the matter or starlight that gives rise to practically all of our experiences in the entire…