Starship Asterisk*

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ara_%28constellation%29 wrote:
<<Ara is a southern constellation situated between Scorpius and Triangulum Australe. Its name is Latin for "altar". Ara was one of Ptolemy's original 48 Greek constellations. In ancient Greek mythology, Ara was identified as the altar of Lycaon. Lycaon sacrificed a child to Zeus on the altar on mount Lycaeus, and immediately after the sacrifice was turned into a wolf, which may have also formed the basis for the myth of the constellation Lupus. In other Greek tales, Ara was identified with the altar of the god of wine, Dionysus, or with that of the centaur Chiron; its original Latin name was Ara Centauri.

[size=200]ARA[/size]

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The constellation's stars have no names in Western culture, but the Chinese call α Arae "Choo" ("club" or "staff"), and ε Arae "Tso Kang", meaning 'left guard'. The northwest corner of Ara is crossed by the Milky Way and contains several open clusters and diffuse nebulae. The brightest of the globular clusters, NGC 6397, is 8,200 light-years from our solar system and might be the closest cluster of that kind.>>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGC_6397 wrote:
<<NGC 6397 is a globular cluster in the Ara constellation. It is located about 7,200 light-years from Earth, making it one of the two nearest globular clusters to Earth (the other one being Messier Object 4). The cluster contains around 400,000 stars. NGC 6397 is one of the at least 20 globulars of our Milky Way Galaxy which have undergone a core collapse, meaning that its core has contracted to a very dense stellar agglomeration.

In 2004, a team of astronomers focused on the cluster to estimate the age of the Milky Way Galaxy. They used the UV-Visual Echelle Spectrograph of the Very Large Telescope to measure, for the first time, the beryllium content of two stars in the cluster. This allowed them to deduce the time elapsed between the rise of the first generation of stars in the entire Galaxy and the first generation of stars in the cluster. They added in the estimated age of the stars in the cluster to arrive at an age for the Galaxy (about 13.6 billion years, which is nearly as old as the universe itself).

A Hubble Space Telescope (HST) image of NGC 6397. Credit: HST/NASA/ESA.

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In 2006, a study of NGC6397 using the Hubble Space Telescope was published that showed a clear lower limit in the brightness of the cluster's population of faint stars. The authors deduce that this indicates a lower limit in mass for stars to develop a core that is capable of fusion, and obtain a value of approximately 0.083 times the mass of the Sun.>>

owlice wrote:This is gorgeous! It appeared on Asterisk very recently here. I especially like the texture shown on the right of the image here (bottom of the image on the other thread). Such a beautiful image!

APOD Robot wrote: Shaping NGC 6188

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_football wrote:

Click to view full size image

<<Paper football (also called FIKI Football, Finger football, Chinese football, Biren football or Flick football) refers to a table-top game, loosely based on American football, in which a sheet of paper folded into a small triangle is slid back and forth across a table top by two opponents. This game is widely practiced, generally by boys of primary and middle school age in the United States, as an informal recreation.

A kick off may start the game. The player holds the football under a fingertip of one hand on his end of the table and flicks (kicks) it with a finger from the other hand towards the opposing player's end of the table. The receiving team gets possession where the ball stops. If any part of the ball is overhanging the end of the table a safety has occurred. The kicking team is awarded 2 points and the receiving team kicks off to the other team from its own end of the table. A touchdown (TD) is generally worth 6 points, as in American football. It is scored when a player advances the ball such that it comes to rest with part of the ball extending over the edge the opponent's end of the table without falling to the ground.

Following a touchdown, the scoring player usually kicks a field goal for 1 point (an extra point or point-after touchdown), or has the option to try for 2 points (a two-point conversion). A field goal is any attempt by a player to hold the ball in one hand (which in turn generally rests on the table), and to flick the ball using the other hand such that it travels through a goalpost formed by the fingers of the opposing player. Field goals generally score 3 points. Games may last a set amount of time but this has historically been dictated by the end of the class period during which the game was started.>>

neufer wrote:<<Paper football>>

bystander wrote:

neufer wrote:<<Paper football>>

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APOD Robot wrote: Shaping NGC 6188

Ann wrote:Which is why I'm unhappy with an image like this. The Hubble palette :evil: completely plays down the remarkable star responsible for all the nebulosity.

Pat17 wrote:I love this image, but I was wondering what formation is at the bottom right portion of the image. Anyone have any ideas?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_Nebula wrote:
<<The Stingray Nebula (Hen 3-1357) is the youngest known planetary nebula (PN). The Stingray is located in the direction of the southern constellation Ara (the Altar). Karl Gordon Henize classified Stingray Nebula as an A or B type Hα emission line star in 1967. It was observed in 1971 to be a pre-planetary nebulae (PPNe) when it seemed to be a asymptotic giant branch (AGB) B1 supergiant. It was discovered as a planetary nebula (PN) in 1989 by the IUE. Parthasarathy et al. concluded that the light from the event arrived at Earth after 1975, probably in 1987 (the light would have travelled for about 18,000 years). In 1995 the central planetary nebula nucleus (PNN) was observed as a DA white dwarf, having seemingly faded by a factor of three between 1987 and 1995. The PNN has an estimated mass of 0.6 MΘ, and has an observed companion star separated by 0.3 arcsec. Nebula mass is estimated as 0.015 M_☉. Luminosity is estimated to be 3000 L_☉.>>

Boomer12k wrote:
Maybe we should rename it....."The Sistine Nebula" after Micheal Angelo's work on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. You know the one where Adam and God are reaching towards each other....this reminds me of that....

• [list]NGC 6188's altar-ego

neufer wrote:

Boomer12k wrote:
Maybe we should rename it....."The Sistine Nebula" after Micheal Angelo's work on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. You know the one where Adam and God are reaching towards each other....this reminds me of that....

• [list]NGC 6188's altar-ego

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lems1802 wrote:I couldn't hold myself to associate the gorgeous image of the NGC 6188 the very moment I saw the APOD of 2010 July 16 to the Michelangelo's Creation of Adam at the Sistine Chapel. Then, I created this morphing, just for fun since I'm an atheist.