This month's meeting will once again be on the SRSU campus in the Warnock Science Bldg. Room 101 on Wednesday, 8 November at 7:30 p.m. Chuck Dobbins will be presenting the fourth in a series of programs "Introduction to the Constellations."

           This photograph, taken by the Japanese Space Agency's AKARI spacecraft, shows the Large Magellanic Cloud - a satellite galaxy to the Milky Way visible from the Southern Hemisphere. The spacecraft is in the process of scanning the entire sky in the infrared spectrum. This view of the Large Magellanic Cloud shows how the distribution of gas and dust that forms a disk-like structure. The bright region in the bottom-left of the image is the famous Tarantula Nebula, where many new stars are forming. 
           The infrared surveyor AKARI, a Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) mission with ESA participation, is nearing the completion of its first scan of the entire sky. During this phase of the mission, it has supplied the largest wavelength coverage of the Large Magellanic Cloud to date, and provided fascinating new images of this galaxy.
           The Large Magellanic Cloud is a neighbouring galaxy to the Milky Way, the galaxy to which our Solar System belongs. It is located extremely close by astronomical standards, at a distance of 160 000 light years and it contains about 10 thousand million stars, about one tenth of our Galaxy's stellar population.
           The first image is a far-infrared view obtained by the Far-Infrared Surveyor (FIS) instrument on board AKARI. It reveals the distribution of interstellar matter – dust and gas – over the entire galaxy. Dust grains in these interstellar clouds are heated by the light from newly born stars, and subsequently re-radiate this energy in the form of infrared light. So, the infrared emission indicates that many stars are currently being formed. Such copious star formation activity across a whole galaxy is called a ‘star burst'.
           The nature of the Large Magellanic Cloud is further revealed by the contrasting distribution of the interstellar matter and the stars. The interstellar matter forms a disk-like structure whilst the stars are located in the ‘spindle' shape in the lower half of the image. This shows that the two components are clearly displaced from one another.
           Astronomers believe that the observed star formation and the displacement of these two components in the Large Magellanic Cloud were both triggered by the gravitational force generated by our own Galaxy, the Milky Way.
           The bright region in the bottom-left of the image is known as the "Tarantula Nebula." It is a very productive factory of stars.
           The second image was taken at near- and mid-infrared wavelengths by AKARI's Infrared Camera (IRC), and provides a close-up view of part of the Large Magellanic Cloud.
           This image shows many old stars (visible as white dots) in addition to the interstellar clouds. It enables astronomers to study the way stars recycle their constituent gases and return them to the interstellar medium at the end of their lives.
           These and new data obtained by AKARI will unlock the secrets of how both the Large Magellanic Cloud and our own Galaxy have formed and evolved to their current state.

           The Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, and the National Radio Astronomical Observatory teamed up to produce this composite image of galaxy cluster MS0735.6+7421, located about 2.5 billion light-years from Earth. The cluster contains dozens of galaxies held together by gravity. A truly supermassive black hole lurks at the heart of this cluster, containing more than a billion solar masses. The red areas are twin jets of material streaming away from the black hole.
           This is a composite image of galaxy cluster MS0735.6+7421, located about 2.6 billion light-years away in the constellation Camelopardus.
           The image represents three views of the region that astronomers have combined into one photograph. The optical view of the galaxy cluster, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys in February 2006, shows dozens of galaxies bound together by gravity.
           Diffuse, hot gas with a temperature of nearly 50 million degrees permeates the space between the galaxies. The gas emits X-rays, seen as blue in the image taken with the Chandra X-ray Observatory in November 2003. The X-ray portion of the image shows enormous holes or cavities in the gas, each roughly 640 light-years in diameter — nearly seven times the diameter of the Milky Way.
           The cavities are filled with charged particles gyrating around magnetic field lines and emitting radio waves shown in the red portion of image taken with the Very Large Array telescope in New Mexico in June 1993. The cavities were created by jets of charged particles ejected at nearly light speed from a supermassive black hole weighing nearly a billion times the mass of our Sun lurking in the nucleus of the bright central galaxy.
           The jets displaced more than one trillion solar masses worth of gas. The power required to displace the gas exceeded the power output of the Sun by nearly ten trillion times in the past 100 million years.

           This Cassini image shows a star peeking through Saturn's rings. Scientists use these kinds of images to study the thickness and consistency of the rings. As the light from the obscured star dims and brightens, it can give researchers clues about how various features might have formed. Cassini took this image on September 26, 2006 when it was approximately 515,000 kilometers (320,000 miles) from Saturn.
           These side-by-side views of a star seen through Saturn's densely populated B ring show marked contrast between the region where spokes — the ghostly radial features periodically seen in the B ring — are produced and regions where no spokes are seen.
           In the view at left, the ring displays an uneven grainy texture, with a great deal of variability in brightness along the direction of ring particle motion. In the view at right, the ring is far smoother and more uniform along the same longitudinal direction.
           Ring scientists on the Cassini Imaging Team are studying images such as these to understand the processes by which spokes are created. This difference in appearance from one location to another on the ring could provide the researchers with helpful insights into the features' formation.
           The views were acquired about half an hour apart as the Cassini spacecraft looked toward the unlit side of the rings from about 33 degrees above the ringplane.
           The images were taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 26, 2006 at a distance of approximately 515,000 kilometers (320,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 102 degrees. Image scale is about 3 kilometers (2 miles) per pixel.
           The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
           For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.