M51- Cosmic Whirlpool

The Hubble Telescope took this image in 2005. The two galaxies are about 31 million light years apart but the smaller galaxy in the background is a satellite galaxy. What I find most interesting is the brihgter objects in the main galaxy. They seem too big to be a normal star, so a couple theories I came up with was that maybe they were galaxies behind the main one, super stars (a theory of the universe is that first there were super large stars that super nova'd and became galaxies, so I'm thinking maybe these are stars that are still breaking up and becoming smaller), or a suggestion of Mr. Percival's is that maybe they are star clusters. That's hard for me to imagine though since when we saw star clusters through the telescope they seemed to have no color, but that means nothing in astronomy.

Transit of Mercury

That little dot in the lower left corner? Yeah, that's Mercury. Picture was taken for Dallas Texax using an H-alpha filter.

Attempted Observations

Yesterday Giancarlo and I had planned to do some observations after a couple rounds of GH. Unfortunately, the moon was extremely bright last night and only a few starts were visable; not even enough to make out constellations. I still think I should have taken advantage of the clarity and beauty of last Saturday's sky but I didn't want to take the 'scope out by myself.

Crescent Moon and Venus

This image shows both the Moon and Venus in a crescent phase-during the day. The picture was taken in Hungary, right before the moon eclipsed Venus. Venus reappeared an hour later, apparently.