Astronomy Biography #2: James South

 

 "South, James." Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Vol. 12. Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2008. 551-552.Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 18 Dec. 2014.

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_South

The Observatory of the Late Sir James South
   http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1870AReg....8..196.

APOD 2.6: Aurora Shimmer and a Meteor Flash

           Northern lights, or aurora borealis, shimmered in the skies over the island of Kvaløya, near Tromsø Norway on  December 13, 2009. The picture also captures the flash of a fireball meteor from the Geminid Meteor Shower in December 2009, streaking past the handle of the big dipper. At the end of this week, the Geminid meteor shower will continue but be disrupted by the last quarter moon. 

APOD 2.5: The Seahorse of the Large Magellanic Cloud

The dark object to the right of the image looks like a seahorse, but it is actually a pillar of smokey dust about 20 light years long. the dust structure occurs in our neighboring Large Magellanic Cloud, in a star forming region near the expansive Tarantula Nebula. near the "neck" of the "seahorse" is NGC 2074.  The color image was taken in 2008 by the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 in honor of Hubble's 100,000th trip around the Earth.

APOD 2.4: LDN 988 Dark Nebula in Cygnus

This picture is focusing on the dark nebula LDN 988 found in the star fields of northern Cygnus. the picture, composed with telescope and camera, is 2 degrees across. that corresponds to about 70 light-years at the estimated 2,000 light-year distance of LDN 988. 

APOD 2.3: Orion in Gas, Dust and Stars

This deep exposure picture of Orion shows dark nebula and star clusters in this extended patch of the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex. The brightest three stars on the left are the most famous that make up orion's belt. Thee objects in this picture are about 15,000 light years away and span for about 75 years. 

APOD 2.2: Extra Green Aurora Over Norway

This extra green aurora was seen over the summit of the Austenesfjorden fjord close to the town of Svolvear on the Lofoten islands in northern Norway. This picture was taken in early March, but the sun has been creating many auroras because it is cose to ts maximum surface activity in its 11-year-magnetic-cycle.  

APOD 2.1: Iridescent Cloud Edge Over Colorado

 

When watching the eclipse on October 23, spotters in Colorado suffered from cloud coverage. Unexpectadely, the clouds tarted to show iridescence, the diffraction of sunlight around a thin screen of nearly uniformly-sized water droplets. Different colors of the sunlight become deflected by different angles and come to the observer from slightly different directions. The white streak on the right are the trails of an airplane.