Where am I?

[Beyond]

Say... isn't that the fox fur nebula, that an earlier photo of looks very much like the Fire Fox logo?

[Moonlady]

I am as famous as the Terminator and we both have to say:

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

[TNT]

Meh, I'm just going to guess on this one:

Apophis

[Moonlady]

Good one, but not me, I'll be back much later

[MargaritaMc]

Hyakutake is a long-period comet. Before its most recent passage through the Solar System, its orbital period was about 17,000 years,[2][5] but the gravitational perturbation of the giant planets has increased this period to 70,000 years.[2][5]
From Wikipedia.

Margarita

[Moonlady]

I am a longperiod comet and I got a third tail, which couldnt be seen by the naked eye, but was found out by powerful instruments.

[MargaritaMc]

I am a longperiod comet and I got a third tail, which couldnt be seen by the naked eye, but was found out by powerful instruments.

Oh, Hale-Bopp!
Margarita

[Moonlady]

I am a longperiod comet and I got a third tail, which couldnt be seen by the naked eye, but was found out by powerful instruments.

Oh, Hale-Bopp!
Margarita

Yes!!!

Here is my third tail:

Sodium tail

Comet Hale–Bopp's neutral sodium tail (the straight tail extending up to the left from the nucleus)[38]
One of the most remarkable discoveries was that the comet had a third type of tail. In addition to the well-known gas and dust tails, Hale–Bopp also exhibited a faint sodium tail, only visible with powerful instruments with dedicated filters. Sodium emission had been previously observed in other comets, but had not been shown to come from a tail. Hale–Bopp's sodium tail consisted of neutral atoms (not ions), and extended to some 50 million kilometres in length.[38]

The source of the sodium appeared to be the inner coma, although not necessarily the nucleus. There are several possible mechanisms for generating a source of sodium atoms, including collisions between dust grains surrounding the nucleus, and 'sputtering' of sodium from dust grains by ultraviolet light. It is not yet established which mechanism is primarily responsible for creating Hale–Bopp's sodium tail, and the narrow[38] and diffuse[39] components of the tail may have different origins.[40]

While the comet's dust tail roughly followed the path of the comet's orbit and the gas tail pointed almost directly away from the Sun, the sodium tail appeared to lie between the two. This implies that the sodium atoms are driven away from the comet's head by radiation pressure.[38]

And I'll be back around the year 4385.

The comet likely made its last perihelion 4,200 years ago.[29] Its orbit is almost perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic, which ensures that close approaches to planets are rare. However, in April 1996 the comet passed within 0.77 AU of Jupiter, close enough for its orbit to be affected by the planet's gravity.[29] The comet's orbit was shortened considerably to a period of roughly 2,533 years,[1] and it will next return to the inner Solar System around the year 4385.[4] Its greatest distance from the Sun (aphelion) will be about 370 AU,[1] reduced from about 525 AU.[30][31

[MargaritaMc]

That third tail is fascinating! But I don't think I'll still be here to see it next time around, even if its close approach to Jupiter shortened its orbit a little!
I am browsing the Apod archives at present and will post a puzzle later.
Margarita

[Beyond]

Hale-Bopp had 3-tails Huh! I never heard that before.

[Ann]

Margarita wrote:
The two images of The Flaming Star nebula looked totally different from each other - and I then I realised that they probably were taken from different orientations. Is that correct?

Take a look at this picture again. It is centered on the star, and I'd say that the color balance is somewhat blue, which brings out the blue star very clearly. No similar effort has been made to bring out as much as possible of the red nebulosity. Yes, we can see some red nebulosity, to be sure, but truly dedicated emission nebulae photographers make more of an effort to bring out lots of Ha.

Now take a look at the other picture again. This photo doesn't focus on the star, AE Aurigae, but rather on the nebula it creates, IC 405. This nebula is seen on the right in this picture. To the left is another emission nebula, IC 410. A lot of effort has been made to bring out as much red nebulosity as possible. You can see that much of the surrounding space between the nebulae is tinted red, even though the nebulae are at different distances and can't be "spilling over" into one another. Because of the effort to bring out a lot of red nebulosity, a long red "tail" has been made visible in IC 405. By contrast, the ionizing star itself, AE Aurigae, isn't very prominent in this picture (it can be seen at about 2 o'clock). In the picture that focused on AE Aurigae, none of the long red "tail" of IC 405 could be seen. Wait, I take that back! If you look closely at the uppermost part of that picture, you can actually see that what looks like a faint reddish tinge along the upper edge of the picture. That faint reddishness is the red tail that is so prominent in the other picture!

As you can see, the orientation of the two pictures is different, too. In the "IC 405/IC 410" picture, the tail of IC 405 is "hanging down". In the "AE Aurigae" picture, the tail is running along the upper edge of the picture.

Ann

[MargaritaMc]

WOW! After all that information about the Flaming Star Nebula, I really can no longer resist posting this! (And, yes, I confess to being an Elvis fan. ..)

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

Puzzle coming later!
Margarita

[MargaritaMc]

why_am_I_DOOMED.jpg

[Ann]

Hey, that's the cloud that is about to fall into the central black hole of the Milky Way, Margarita!

And those blue lines are orbits of stars orbiting the black hole.

Ann

[MargaritaMc]

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap111230.html
Yup!
Margarita

[Beyond]

Huh. I don't remember that APOD at all.

[Ann]

Here's another puzzle.

Click to view full size image

As you can see, this image shows a meteor shower.

What is the name of this meteor shower?

In what year was this particular meteor shower this intense?

From what location of the Earth was the meteor shower seen to be this intense?

What causes this particular meteor storm?

Here's a tricky question. Moses and Mary might be regarded as "grandparents", or possibly "great-grandparents", or possibly "grand-godparents" of the babies falling from the sky. Explain how.




Ann

[Moonlady]

I shoot this answer:

I know and like to watch out for the Perseids and Leonids.

Leonids can be seen massively. So I go with Leonids.

[Ann]

Leonids is correct, Moonlady!

Now try to find the answers to some or all of my other questions, too!

Ann

[MargaritaMc]

The picture you showed, Ann, was of

Wikipedia says,
..the most famous depiction of the 1833 actually produced in 1889 for the Adventist book Bible Readings for the Home Circle - the engraving is by Adolf Vollmy based upon an original painting by the Swiss artist Karl Jauslin, that is in turn based on a first-person account of the 1833 storm by a minister, Joseph Harvey Waggoner on his way from Florida to New Orleans.

The meteor storm of 1833 was of truly superlative strength. One estimate is over one hundred thousand meteors an hour, but another, done as the storm abated, estimated in excess of two hundred thousand meteors an hour over the entire region of North America east of the Rocky Mountains. It was marked by the Native Americans, slaves like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass and slave-owners and others. Near Independence, Missouri, it was taken as a sign to push the growing Mormon community out of the area. The founder and first leader of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, noted in his journal that this event was a literal fulfillment of the word of God and a sure sign that the coming of Christ is close at hand.

This particular shower of Leonids was not visible in Europe.
The Leonids are caused by the Earth passing through the streams of material ejected by comet Tempel-Tuttle, which has a 33 year orbital period and intersects that of Earth nearly exactly.

But as for tricky question - no success.

Ann wrote
Here's a tricky question. Moses and Mary might be regarded as "grandparents", or possibly "great-grandparents", or possibly "grand-godparents" of the babies falling from the sky. Explain how.

If the Mary referred to is the one that is the mother of Jesus in the Christian story, then a star was significant in the birth narrative. But this seems very weak, and doesn't include Moses, neither the Hebrew Bible one nor any other Moshe!

And - babies falling from the sky? HUH?
Margarita

[MargaritaMc]

A PS, just for interest!

The orbit of 55P/Tempel–Tuttle intersects that of Earth near exactly, hence streams of material ejected from the comet during perihelion passes do not have to spread out over time to encounter Earth. This coincidence means that streams from the comet at perihelion are still dense when they encounter Earth, resulting in the 33 year cycle of Leonid meteor storms. For example,in November 2009, the earth passed through meteors left behind mainly from the 1466 and 1533 orbit.
Wikipedia

Isn't that fascinating?

[Ann]

Most of it was absolutely perfectly answered, Margarita!

I need to clarify something here. When I talked about "babies" falling from the sky, I actually meant the meteors! So who or what is the "parent" of the meteors?

And the "Mary" I referred to has nothing to do with the biblical Mary. Neither is Moses the Moses of Exodus in the Bible.

Your P.S. contains information that you need to work out who Mary and Moses were!

Ann

[MargaritaMc]

No - my brain isn't working in the right way! And Google is being no help, either.
I'm presuming you're looking for something about the passage of the comet that left the debris that, eventually, caused the 1833 Leonids, but I'm drawing a blank...
So we shall have to see if Moonlady comes back with the info, or one of the Superlatively Knowledgeable Asterisk*ians pops into this thread and gives us the benefit of his/her Brainy Head!

Puzzled of Tenerife

[MargaritaMc]

More extraneous info - not answering the question!

The Russian newspaper Pravda wrote According to some legends, a shooting star is the soul flying from the sky to move into a newborn baby, according to others it is, on the contrary, a soul of a person who left her mortal body and is ascending to heaven. If the heavens themselves give us such signs, we have to use it and ask for something (astronomers in this case should be the happiest people on Earth) .

I didn't know that!

Margarita - who must get on with the day!

[Ann]

Margarita, in this post, you mentioned the cause or the origin of the Leonids. The Leonids of 1833 had the same cause as any other Leonid meteor storm.

We call these meteor Leonids because they appear to emanate from the constellation of Leo.

But how can we name the origin of the Leonids? Not the meteors themselves, but the object that caused them. Who can we thank for being able to name the origin of the Leonids?

Thomas Bopp. Source: wikipedia

Mr Bopp, we are indebted to you. Not that you have anything to do with the Leonids, but without you, how could we have named the great comet of 1995?

Ann