[Variable]

I remember we had an Astronomy thread on the old Islamica... so here it is again for anyone interested in the starry night sky.



Pleides open star cluster - if you know where Orion is, follow the three belt stars in a line, and you'll see what some people think looks like a really little dipper. Check it out in a pair of binoculars and it's pretty cool.



A view towards the center of our own galaxy, it's also towards the constellation of Orion (which by the way is visible for us right now in the Northern Hemisphere). It's the most dense region of stars in the night sky.

(that thing that looks like a comet in this photo is actually the fuel plume from a booster rocket of a satellite launch)



Saturn



Crescent Nebula - They think it's a star in the last stages of it's life, beginning to eject it's gases into space. It's 4700 light-years away in Cygnus.



Here's a cool youtube video... kind of makes you feel small.

Planets and Star sizes

[Variable]

So.... has anyone ever seen the Northern Lights?

[Purple_alien]

I love astronomy. They offer it at my school, but everyone wants to take it, so it gets filled fast. Some of my fondest memories involve me out in the wilderness looking up at the stars. I wanna see the Northern Lights, but I need the right people to be with I guess

[Timbit]

We had an Astronomy thread on Islamica?
I always wanted to be an astronomer...but I never wanted to put up with Physics.

Anybody seen Comet 17P/Holmes in the sky lately?
It's supposed to be extra bright. To the northeast.

[Ilikemyscarf]

I love astronomy! I wanted to be an astronaut when I was little, that all changed with the Columbia accident back in 2003.

[Arabatman]

Asalaamualaikum,

I also wanted to major in Astronomy in the beginning...:sigh:. I wish i had gone into it now that im this far into Civil. I love gazing at the stars, but unfortunately you can hardly see any in northern VA. I wish i was living somewhere with no light pollution. I want to live in the mountains. Oh, and I must see the northern lights! That means i must also go to Canada.

Asalaamualaikum,

-Zahid

[TariqBinSleepin]

Originally Posted by Arabatman

Asalaamualaikum,

I also wanted to major in Astronomy in the beginning...:sigh:. I wish i had gone into it now that im this far into Civil. I love gazing at the stars, but unfortunately you can hardly see any in northern VA. I wish i was living somewhere with no light pollution. I want to live in the mountains. Oh, and I must see the northern lights! That means i must also go to Canada.

Asalaamualaikum,

-Zahid

Assalamu Alaikum,

Get the heck outta here dood! I was going to do Astronomy too ....i LoVE SPACE, UNIVERSE! the whole SHIBANG! Wallahi I was so close to doing it -_-, but i like art more...i might switch majors not sure yet..

[Variable]

Hey! You guys actually saw my post!

Originally Posted by Timbit

We had an Astronomy thread on Islamica?
I always wanted to be an astronomer...but I never wanted to put up with Physics.

Anybody seen Comet 17P/Holmes in the sky lately?
It's supposed to be extra bright. To the northeast.

Yeh! I think a girl named Razia started one when I was new.



Here's a view of Holmes and it's ion tale. I didn't even know there was a comet in view these days!

[Variable]

Originally Posted by Purple_alien

I love astronomy. They offer it at my school, but everyone wants to take it, so it gets filled fast. Some of my fondest memories involve me out in the wilderness looking up at the stars. I wanna see the Northern Lights, but I need the right people to be with I guess

That's awesome, but why do you need to be with the right people to see the Northern lights? haha. I haven't seen them for a while, They kind of stop you in your tracks if you seem them on a particularly active night.

[Variable]

Originally Posted by Ilikemyscarf

I love astronomy! I wanted to be an astronaut when I was little, that all changed with the Columbia accident back in 2003.

Here are some interesting astronomy facts:

"If the sun is reduced to the size of a ping-pong ball, Earth becomes a mote of dust eight feet from it, with a smaller speck, the moon, nestled beside it a quarter of an inch away. Jupiter is a pea 40 feet from the one-inch sun. A piece of dust 300 feet from the sun is Pluto, the smallest planet [this is an old book] in the solar system, the sun's family. Comets are atomic particles, invisible to a microscope, extending in a cloud up to several dozen miles from the sun. Although there are trillions of comets, the vast volume of space they occupy keeps them, on average several yards apart.

Alpha Centauri, the nearest star (a triple-star system), consists of two walnuts and a pea 400 miles away. Even if the universe were shrunk to this microscopic scale, it would be inconvenient to hike to the nearest star. If the model were encompassed in a volume of space the size of the Earth, the vast hollow globe would contain only 800 stars, represented by walnuts, cherries, oranges, and so on. The billions of other stars in the galaxy would range well outside the Earth-sized region..."

That was from 'The Universe and Beyond' by Terence Dickinson.

[Variable]

Originally Posted by Arabatman

Asalaamualaikum,

I also wanted to major in Astronomy in the beginning...:sigh:. I wish i had gone into it now that im this far into Civil. I love gazing at the stars, but unfortunately you can hardly see any in northern VA. I wish i was living somewhere with no light pollution. I want to live in the mountains. Oh, and I must see the northern lights! That means i must also go to Canada.

I think the money's definitely better in what your doing haha. But yeh, the northern lights are a must see. Normally they're green, but depending on the composition of the atmosphere (and usually associated with how far north you go) you get pink and yellow, and all kinds of colors. But I'm not going to try and describe it here... there's no way I could.

[jaani]

Astronomy

I was always interested......I even took a class just for fun, but the physics drained me out The complexities dont interest me as much as just looking at the beauty and vastness of it all........I go into deep mode thinking of how small I'm and how big this universe actually is and everything beyond. It makes me ponder Allah's (swt) power and creativity, Mashallah

I live in the city and the light pollution is bad, but not so much as NY I've some family friends who live in a town nearby, and every time I go there I can see the sky with its bright stars CLEARLY!! Its so pretty Mashallah

I'm always in awe of the Northern Lights when I see its pictures, but I have yet to witness the beauty


~j

[GOTFIVEONIT]

orion's belt is easy to spot. its the three stars in a row up in the sky. i have been reading alot about exo-planets lately. i can look up at the sky and know which star has planet's in them, simply by using the constelations. and if you look carefully you can see a red star shining, that would be mars. and if your awake aroun fajr, you can see venus rising in the morning, its the morning star usually shining very bright. believe it or not, venus is alot brighter than mercury, even though mercury is closer to the sun. that's because venus has a run away green house effect making it shine brighter than mercury.

for naked eye observation, if you want to know which star is a sun and which star is a planet, the star that twinkles is a sun. the star that doesnt twinkle, and is usually brighter, is most likely one of the five planets visible to the naked eye, with jupiter being the largest.

[slime]

i love looking at stars...especially when i think about how the star that im looking at might not exist anymore. makes you feel like nothing.

[Aryan_]

Originally Posted by slime

makes you feel like nothing.

Looking at the stars makes me feel invincible.