Starship Asterisk*

rstevenson wrote:

M45 is orbiting clockwise to the right slower that our Sun is
thereby drifting back to the left towards the Orion Nebula.

Thanks again. So if I'm interpreting that right, up in the stereo animation is clockwise in our galaxy's flow. That's the general trend of most of the stars we can see there, but there are some that are moving almost at a right-angle to that flow. I suppose there must be some stars orbiting the galaxy in odd directions compared to the major flow, otherwise there'd be no central bulge and little thickness to the disk. And there's probably a few being kicked out for disrupting the class.

M45 is orbiting clockwise to the right slower that our Sun is
thereby drifting back to the left towards the Orion Nebula.

rstevenson wrote:
Thank you Art, for the animation. What a strange chaotic (seemingly, I know) dance we are all engaged in. I'm trying hard to picture that little rectangular segment of our galaxy, with all its different stellar motions, as somehow progressing round the Milky Way, along with all of our billions of neighbours, in a more or less merry-go-round fashion. It might help me to know, relative to the Milky Way's center and plane, in what direction we're looking when we look at the Pleiades.

rstevenson wrote:

APOD Robot wrote:
Hurtling through a cosmic dust cloud some 400 light-years away, ...

Hurtling?

bystander wrote:

[url=http://www.naic.edu/~gibson/thesis/]Here[/url] is an interesting composite of the Pleiades: ultraviolet (blue), optical (green), and far-infrared (red). [i]Credit: Steven Gibson[/i]

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Gustav_M/45 wrote:

[size=175][color=#FF00FF]Carl Gustav M/45[/color][/size]

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Kulsprutepistol m/45 (Kpist m/45), also known as the Carl Gustav M/45 and the Swedish K SMG, is a 9 mm Swedish submachine gun designed by Gunnar Johnsson, adopted in 1945 (hence the m/45 designation), and manufactured in Eskilstuna, Sweden. The m/45 was the standard submachine gun of the Swedish Army from 1945 to the late 1990s.

rstevenson wrote:
So how fast are they moving relative to that dust cloud? And are the sisters bound to each other or just coincidentally moving in more or less the same direction?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleiades_%28star_cluster%29 wrote:
<<The cluster's relative motion will eventually lead it to be located, as seen from Earth many millennia in the future, passing below the feet of what is currently the constellation of Orion. Also, like most open clusters, the Pleiades will not stay gravitationally bound forever, as some component stars will be ejected after close encounters and others will be stripped by tidal gravitational fields. Calculations suggest that the [~115 million year old] cluster will take about 250 million [more] years to disperse, with gravitational interactions with giant molecular clouds and the spiral arms of our galaxy also hastening its demise.>>

APOD Robot wrote: Hurtling through a cosmic dust cloud some 400 light-years away, ...

Ann wrote:
The Pleiades look super-lovely as always (no, not as always - thank you, John Davies, for your great image), but what really caught my attention was the weird nebular shape in the center of the picture. APOD robot wrote:

the bird-like visage of LBN 777 near center

Bird-like visage???? You mean like one of these???

Maximum diameter: 3000 arcseconds
Emission nebula (questionable)
This object possibly does not exist.
Brightness level: 6 (1=brightest, ... 6=faintest)