APOD: The Milky Way Over Monument Valley (2012 Aug 01)

[Anthony Barreiro]

This is a very beautiful picture. We may note that, unlike other pictures taken of this area, this one has been made with a technique that doesn't emphasize the bright stars. That makes it harder to pick out the constellations, but you can more easily see some other features.

One of the easiest deep-sky objects in this picture is the North America Nebula, right above the most obvious "mitten" formation on the ground. Just above the North America Nebula (but not "touching" it) is Deneb, the alpha star in constellation Cygnus. ...

... .

As I said, this is a great picture! I agree that there is something otherworldly about it. It does look like a good landing site for UFOs!

Ann

I'm rather proud of myself. I have more trouble getting oriented in a picture than when I'm looking at the sky. I tried to find stars and constellations in this picture, but the number of stars visible, the similar brightnesses of stars in the image, and the slight blurring of each star (is this because it's a time lapse picture?) made it hard to identify my familiar first- and second-magnitude friends. Then I saw the North America nebula, and was able to work my way south from there, recognizing the brighter nebulae and clusters. When I read Ann's expertly guided tour, I was pleased that I had correctly identified all the deep sky objects I recognized, mostly Messier objects. It's good to be at home in the sky.

[neufer]

In some cases buttes may be produced by the material left behind in an extinct volcano, or by magma inclusions. But caprock formations are much more common, and are the cause of the buttes in Monument Valley.

<<A butte is a conspicuous isolated hill with steep, often vertical sides and a small, relatively flat top; buttes are smaller than mesas, plateaus, and table landforms. In some regions, such as the north central and northwestern United States, the word is used for any hill. The word butte comes from a French word meaning "small hill"; its use is prevalent in the western United States, including the southwest, where "mesa" is also used. Because of their distinctive shapes, buttes are frequently key landmarks in both plains and mountainous areas. In differentiating mesas and buttes, geographers use the rule that a mesa has a top wider than its height, while a butte's top is narrower.

Three classic buttes are Scotts Bluff (actually a collection of five bluffs) in Nebraska, Crested Butte in Colorado, and Elephant Butte in New Mexico. Scotts Bluff Scotts Bluff (steep hill), which rises over 830 feet above the plains at its highest point was important 19th century landmark on the Oregon Trail and Mormon Trail.>>

When I was in the Army I used to motorcycle up the Rio Grande to Elephant Butte on weekends.

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

<<Elephant Butte Dam is a concrete gravity dam on the Rio Grande near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. The river was dammed here, impounding the Elephant Butte Reservoir for recreation and agriculture, lessening the downstream flow from a Rio Bravo to a stream a foot deep. The name "Elephant Butte" refers to a volcanic core similar to Devils Tower in Wyoming. It is now an island in the lake. The butte was said to have the shape of an elephant.

Truth or Consequences is a spa city and the county seat of Sierra County, New Mexico, United States. Originally named Hot Springs, the city changed its name to Truth or Consequences, the title of a popular NBC radio program. In 1950, Ralph Edwards, the host of the radio quiz show Truth or Consequences, announced that he would air the program from the first town that renamed itself after the show. Hot Springs won the honor. Edwards visited the town during the first weekend of May for the next fifty years. This event was called "Fiesta" and included a beauty contest, a parade, and a stage show. The city still celebrates Fiesta each year on the first weekend of May. The parade generally features area celebrities such as the Hatch Chile Queen. Fiesta also features a dance in Ralph Edwards Park.

The dam is part of the Rio Grande Project, a project to provide power and irrigation to south-central New Mexico and west Texas. The United States Congress authorized construction of the dam on February 25, 1905 and it began in 1911. It was completed in 1916 but allowed to begin filling in 1915. Elephant Butte Dam is 301 feet high, 1,674 feet long. The width at the top of the dam is 18 feet and 228 feet at the base. At the time of its construction, the dam was the largest irrigation dam ever built with the exception of the Aswan Dam in Egypt. It was expected that the dam would become the property of the local settlers once a water tax had reimbursed the government for the cost of construction.

[Anthony Barreiro]

how many spiral arms does our galaxy have ? 6, 4 or 2 and how many arms are actually observed
what arm is this one ?
what are the locations on earth to see each arm of our galaxy ?

Here is a "YOU ARE HERE" APOD....hold mouse over picture for overlay...
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap080606.html

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This is a very helpful image. It would be even more awesome if the brighter patches were identified on the mouse-over, and if you could tilt the orientation of the disk to get more of a sense of how things look from edge-on. Also, it would help me get oriented to have lines indicating which directions Earth's north celestial and ecliptic poles point relative to the plane of the galaxy.

[Jeeplvr2000]

Why does teh milky way look curved across the sky in this picture?

[neufer]

Why does the milky way look curved across the sky in this picture?

Why does the International Space Station orbit look curved across the world on this map

[NoelC]

What a gorgeous image, Wally! Thank you for taking us all out there along with you.

-Noel

[saturno2]

Indeed. The Milky Way Galaxy is very beautiful

[fcmbj]

Thanks Chris.

[neufer]

[url=http://www.googleearthanomalies.com/][b][color=#0000FF][size=150]Google Earth Anomalies[/size][/color][/b][/url]

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Long-lost Egyptian pyramids found on Google Earth?
Fox News, August 14, 2012

<<A self-described "satellite archaeology researcher" has garnered widespread media attention with claims that she has found two possible pyramid complexes in Egypt using Google Earth. But experts say her pyramids are nothing more than eroded hills infused with a heavy dose of wishful thinking.

Angela Micol, a North Carolina-based woman who blogs at Google Earth Anomalies, says she discovered the two clusters of mysterious, angular mounds in the Egyptian desert while surveying satellite images of the terrain using Google Earth, the virtual map program. In its coverage, Gizmodo asserts that the desert structures look as if they have been "very deliberately arranged," and that they "bear all the hallmarks of ancient pyramid sites."

If Micol's blog is to be believed, Egyptologists have vetted and are currently investigating her amazing discovery. "The images speak for themselves. It's very obvious what the sites may contain but field research is needed to verify they are, in fact, pyramids," Micol wrote on her blog. Turns out, further field research won't be necessary after all. These mounds are just your common buttes.

"It seems that Angela Micol is one of the so-called 'pyridiots' who see pyramids everywhere," said James Harrell, professor emeritus of archaeological geology at the University of Toledo and a leading expert on the archaeological geology of ancient Egypt. "Her Dimai and Abu Sidhum 'pyramids' are examples of natural rock formations that might be mistaken for archaeological features provided one is unburdened by any knowledge of archaeology or geology. In other words, her pyramids are just wishful thinking by an ignorant observer with an overactive imagination."

The large, three- and four-sided hills Micol chanced upon are geologic features known as buttes, Harrell told Life's Little Mysteries. Commonly seen in the local Faiyum Desert, such buttes form when a mound of sediment contains a difficult-to-erode layer. When the surrounding sediment gradually erodes, that resistant layer gets left on top, making the hill flat. Meanwhile, the smaller hills found in Micol's Google Earth screenshots are circular, and thus nothing like pyramids, Harrell said.

Other geologists attribute the features to the forces of nature as well. "What it looks like to me is an area where a resistant layer of stone is underlain by soft rock, perhaps shales. If that is so, the triangular one looks very much the sort of feature common in the U.S. southwest, and might be called a butte," said Clair Ossian, a geoarcheologist at Tarrant County College who has studied Egypt's sites.

So in summary, sorry folks: nothing to see here but a couple of big buttes. The question is how they garnered so much breathless, and factless, media attention.>>