APOD: Milky Way Over the Spanish Peaks (2016 May 24)

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Expand view Topic review: APOD: Milky Way Over the Spanish Peaks (2016 May 24)

Re: APOD: Milky Way Over the Spanish Peaks (2016 May 24)

by distinct cousin » Thu May 26, 2016 4:16 pm

neufer wrote:
Chris Peterson wrote:
Most of my experience with Swedish is watching Bergman movies,
Well...that explains a lot...
"you make me raff." Mr. Sakamoto, the CEO of Assan Motors in Gung Ho

Re: APOD: Milky Way Over the Spanish Peaks (2016 May 24)

by DavidLeodis » Wed May 25, 2016 7:47 pm

geckzilla wrote:
DavidLeodis wrote:In the explanation it states "the large colorful region surrounding the star Rho Ophiuchus" but that is confusing me because according to the annotation that star has just a bit of blue around it which I would not describe as a "large colourful region". If it had not been mentioned in the explanation I would have thought that star was visually little noticeable in the image. :?
Haha, yeah, twice now I have annotated the position of Rho Oph. Still not sure why the whole complex is named after it. The nebula straddles two constellations with Scorpius getting most of it. I'm thinking maybe the star and its reflection nebula are relatively more noticeable in telescopic views with just eyeballs and no camera.
Thanks geckzilla for your help which is much appreciated :).

Re: APOD: Milky Way Over the Spanish Peaks (2016 May 24)

by geckzilla » Wed May 25, 2016 7:43 pm

DavidLeodis wrote:In the explanation it states "the large colorful region surrounding the star Rho Ophiuchus" but that is confusing me because according to the annotation that star has just a bit of blue around it which I would not describe as a "large colourful region". If it had not been mentioned in the explanation I would have thought that star was visually little noticeable in the image. :?
Haha, yeah, twice now I have annotated the position of Rho Oph. Still not sure why the whole complex is named after it. The nebula straddles two constellations with Scorpius getting most of it. I'm thinking maybe the star and its reflection nebula are relatively more noticeable in telescopic views with just eyeballs and no camera.

Re: APOD: Milky Way Over the Spanish Peaks (2016 May 24)

by othermoons » Wed May 25, 2016 6:58 pm

Thanks.

Re: APOD: Milky Way Over the Spanish Peaks (2016 May 24)

by DavidLeodis » Wed May 25, 2016 6:49 pm

In the explanation it states "the large colorful region surrounding the star Rho Ophiuchus" but that is confusing me because according to the annotation that star has just a bit of blue around it which I would not describe as a "large colourful region". If it had not been mentioned in the explanation I would have thought that star was visually little noticeable in the image. :?

Re: APOD: Milky Way Over the Spanish Peaks (2016 May 24)

by geckzilla » Wed May 25, 2016 2:54 am

neufer wrote:
othermoons wrote:
How sure are we of the location of our galactic center based on observations?
Even if we knew nothing about Sgr A*, the center also becomes very obvious in infrared observations. The obscuring dust can make it look like the center is uncertain, but in fact if you were able to view the MW from the outside of our dust lanes, it would also be quite obvious there. Indirect observations of Sgr A* just make it that much more accurate.

Spitzer infrared image of the Milky Way nucleus.
Image

Re: APOD: Milky Way Over the Spanish Peaks (2016 May 24)

by Ann » Wed May 25, 2016 2:19 am

Chris Peterson wrote:
Ann wrote:
Chris Peterson wrote: Just curious... when you post in a forum like this, do you switch your browser or computer to English, along with the spellcheck dictionary, or do you have a sort of hybrid dictionary with English and Swedish all mixed together (which might lead to många fel, nej?)
The expression många fel, nej would be a dead giveaway that you are not a native Swedish speaker. It is the "nej" that gives you away. I think you can say "mange fejl, ikke" in Danish, but you shouldn't ask me about that.
Interesting. Yeah, if I were reading something I'd commonly expect ikke. But I picked up on the nej parallel with English watching the Danish TV show Rita (about a teacher, FWIW). They use nej in that construction all the time. Younger people. I wonder if it's an idiomatic shift from the small world of the Internet, in a country where essentially everyone speaks English. Not common in Sweden, I guess (would you use inte, or a completely different construction?) I'm not sure how idioms move between the Scandinavian languages.
I haven't seen Rita. The last time I saw something in Danish, it was Matador. I loved it, but they didn't exactly speak 21st century Danish in that one. I must admit I have never heard the Danish "nej" used the way you describe it, but I don't watch Danish TV the way I used to, for the simple reason that I watch so little TV in the first place. And I don't have any young Danish friends.

As for the Swedish translation of "many mistakes, no?" I would say, "många fel, va?". I would write, "många fel, inte sant/ eller hur?".
Most of my experience with Swedish is watching Bergman movies, which isn't exactly modern conversational Swedish!
Maybe not. We don't usually say, "Vem är du?" "Jag är Döden" (pronounced, in his case, "dödn").

Ann

Re: APOD: Milky Way Over the Spanish Peaks (2016 May 24)

by neufer » Wed May 25, 2016 1:59 am

Chris Peterson wrote:
Most of my experience with Swedish is watching Bergman movies,
Well...that explains a lot...

Re: APOD: Milky Way Over the Spanish Peaks (2016 May 24)

by Chris Peterson » Wed May 25, 2016 1:46 am

Ann wrote:
Chris Peterson wrote:
Ann wrote:You guys taught me to write nebulas. My spellcheck still protests.
Just curious... when you post in a forum like this, do you switch your browser or computer to English, along with the spellcheck dictionary, or do you have a sort of hybrid dictionary with English and Swedish all mixed together (which might lead to många fel, nej?)
The expression många fel, nej would be a dead giveaway that you are not a native Swedish speaker. It is the "nej" that gives you away. I think you can say "mange fejl, ikke" in Danish, but you shouldn't ask me about that.
Interesting. Yeah, if I were reading something I'd commonly expect ikke. But I picked up on the nej parallel with English watching the Danish TV show Rita (about a teacher, FWIW). They use nej in that construction all the time. Younger people. I wonder if it's an idiomatic shift from the small world of the Internet, in a country where essentially everyone speaks English. Not common in Sweden, I guess (would you use inte, or a completely different construction?) I'm not sure how idioms move between the Scandinavian languages. Most of my experience with Swedish is watching Bergman movies, which isn't exactly modern conversational Swedish!

Re: APOD: Milky Way Over the Spanish Peaks (2016 May 24)

by MarkBour » Wed May 25, 2016 1:31 am

Ann wrote: You guys taught me to write nebulas. My spellcheck still protests.
So does mine, no Swedish in my settings.

How apropos, that the pluralization of nebula should be a bit of a clouded issue. :D

Re: APOD: Milky Way Over the Spanish Peaks (2016 May 24)

by Ann » Wed May 25, 2016 1:26 am

Chris Peterson wrote:
Ann wrote:You guys taught me to write nebulas. My spellcheck still protests.
Just curious... when you post in a forum like this, do you switch your browser or computer to English, along with the spellcheck dictionary, or do you have a sort of hybrid dictionary with English and Swedish all mixed together (which might lead to många fel, nej?)
The expression många fel, nej would be a dead giveaway that you are not a native Swedish speaker. It is the "nej" that gives you away. I think you can say "mange fejl, ikke" in Danish, but you shouldn't ask me about that.

But as for my spellcheck: yes, I have to change it from English to Swedish and back again, as I switch languages. If I don't, and sometimes I'm too lazy to do it, almost every word I write has an angry red line under it.

The spellcheck I have in school drives me crazy, at least when I try to post something here at Asterisk*. I haven't been able to figure out what language it thinks I'm trying to write in. It protests at every word I write, and then it forcefully puts a capital letter on every tenth word or so - Galaxies, Picture and so on. I think perhaps it is doing this to nouns only (though not to all nouns) so perhaps it thinks I'm trying to write some sort of German.

Ann

Re: APOD: Milky Way Over the Spanish Peaks (2016 May 24)

by Chris Peterson » Wed May 25, 2016 12:41 am

Ann wrote:You guys taught me to write nebulas. My spellcheck still protests.
Just curious... when you post in a forum like this, do you switch your browser or computer to English, along with the spellcheck dictionary, or do you have a sort of hybrid dictionary with English and Swedish all mixed together (which might lead to många fel, nej?)

Re: APOD: Milky Way Over the Spanish Peaks (2016 May 24)

by Ann » Wed May 25, 2016 12:29 am

geckzilla wrote:There are times when I might favor a Latin plural because it sounds better. Maybe. I'm not a big fan of things that end in s having a subsequent es added on, even though it's correct. In the end I think I prefer to be consistent rather than to subjectively pick and choose what I like, though I think the nature of language is possibly closer to the latter. Why did we choose to fully Anglicize the word galaxies while many stick with the Latin nebulae? That's usually what I ask someone who is stuck on the idea that nebulas is wrong.
You guys taught me to write nebulas. My spellcheck still protests.

Ann

Re: APOD: Milky Way Over the Spanish Peaks (2016 May 24)

by geckzilla » Wed May 25, 2016 12:20 am

There are times when I might favor a Latin plural because it sounds better. Maybe. I'm not a big fan of things that end in s having a subsequent es added on, even though it's correct. In the end I think I prefer to be consistent rather than to subjectively pick and choose what I like, though I think the nature of language is possibly closer to the latter. Why did we choose to fully Anglicize the word galaxies while many stick with the Latin nebulae? That's usually what I ask someone who is stuck on the idea that nebulas is wrong.

Re: APOD: Milky Way Over the Spanish Peaks (2016 May 24)

by Chris Peterson » Wed May 25, 2016 12:08 am

geckzilla wrote:I Anglicized annuli to annuluses the other day. I'm still not sure how I feel about it. Some things like nebulas I have no problem with at this point but for some reason annuluses didn't sound right, probably because I almost never see it written that way.
Words like that aren't used so much in ordinary communication, either. They are more along the lines of jargon, and we hear jargonized plurals as well.

Still, I don't worry much about how something sounds. That's just experience. I almost always choose the anglicized version of a plural over the Latin one, simply as a matter of form. Anything to simplify the language is a good thing, as long as it doesn't increase confusion or reduce comprehension. (And in fact, I'll bet that a lot of people don't know what "annulus" even means, and if you told them and asked them to refer to several in a sentence, they'd say "annuluses", because that's the obvious choice.

Re: APOD: Milky Way Over the Spanish Peaks (2016 May 24)

by geckzilla » Tue May 24, 2016 11:46 pm

I Anglicized annuli to annuluses the other day. I'm still not sure how I feel about it. Some things like nebulas I have no problem with at this point but for some reason annuluses didn't sound right, probably because I almost never see it written that way.

Re: APOD: Milky Way Over the Spanish Peaks (2016 May 24)

by Chris Peterson » Tue May 24, 2016 8:15 pm

heehaw wrote:Gosh, I got so confused reading this profound discussion of Latin endings, that I decided to find out who was right, and who was wrong, by clicking on "Rho Ophiuchus" in today's caption - hey, I thought, that ought to take me to a definitive source! And it took me to .... Astronomy Picture of the Day! There can't be any source more authoritative than THAT! And ... guess what!!!!
There you go! (And not everything can be categorized as either right or wrong.)

Re: APOD: Milky Way Over the Spanish Peaks (2016 May 24)

by Fred the Cat » Tue May 24, 2016 8:05 pm

All kidding aside from earlier but what a change from Martin's usual APOD images. Search Pugh. Excellent write-up too on how it's possible to create such a landscape. I've been a fan to his deep sky photography and now I'm a fan of more down-to-Earth images too. Thanks!! :clap:

Re: APOD: Milky Way Over the Spanish Peaks (2016 May 24)

by heehaw » Tue May 24, 2016 7:54 pm

Gosh, I got so confused reading this profound discussion of Latin endings, that I decided to find out who was right, and who was wrong, by clicking on "Rho Ophiuchus" in today's caption - hey, I thought, that ought to take me to a definitive source! And it took me to .... Astronomy Picture of the Day! There can't be any source more authoritative than THAT! And ... guess what!!!!

Re: APOD: Milky Way Over the Spanish Peaks (2016 May 24)

by Mactavish » Tue May 24, 2016 7:42 pm

Then, are those thingies up there thingyus? or thingyii?

Re: APOD: Milky Way Over the Spanish Peaks (2016 May 24)

by Chris Peterson » Tue May 24, 2016 6:28 pm

jisles wrote:The International Astronomical Union says...
Yes, they do. Which means that this is the recommended usage for professional astronomers to use in publications. It isn't a mandate, even for them, however.
I'm not sure who copied whom here, but the IAU is the official body for star designations. Sorry, but forms such as "Alpha Centaurus" and "Rho Ophiuchus" are incorrect. You should use the genitive.
They are not "wrong". They simply deviate from IAU convention. Language is dictated by usage, not by professional societies without legal authority.

Use the Latin genitive if you like. I will continue to eschew it for simplicity and clarity, and encourage others to do the same. Nothing wrong about that at all.

Re: APOD: Milky Way Over the Spanish Peaks (2016 May 24)

by jisles » Tue May 24, 2016 6:23 pm

The International Astronomical Union says (http://www.iau.org/public/themes/constellations/):

'Each Latin constellation name has two forms: the nominative, for use when talking about the constellation itself, and the genitive, or possessive, which is used in star names. For instance, Hamal, the brightest star in the constellation Aries (nominative form), is also called Alpha Arietis (genitive form), meaning literally “the alpha of Aries”.'

Sky & Telescope (http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronom ... eviations/) says:

'Every constellation name has two forms: the nominative, for use when you're talking about the constellation itself, and the genitive, or possessive, which is used in star names. For instance, Hamal, the brightest star in the constellation Aries (nominative form), is also called Alpha Arietis (genitive form), meaning literally "the Alpha of Aries."'

I'm not sure who copied whom here, but the IAU is the official body for star designations. Sorry, but forms such as "Alpha Centaurus" and "Rho Ophiuchus" are incorrect. You should use the genitive.

Re: APOD: Milky Way Over the Spanish Peaks (2016 May 24)

by Fred the Cat » Tue May 24, 2016 5:35 pm

neufer wrote: "Sgr A* contains a cluster of dark stellar objects or a mass of degenerate fermions"
That degenerate matter. It's such a deviant form of an ideal gas...The next thing you know they'll be allowing anti-matter to tell us who we voted for in the next election. :wink:
By the way Hillary won because she appointed Bill Clinton to be Vice President
From there - everything degenerated. :ssmile:

Re: APOD: Milky Way Over the Spanish Peaks (2016 May 24)

by neufer » Tue May 24, 2016 3:27 pm

othermoons wrote:
How sure are we of the location of our galactic center based on observations?

Re: APOD: Milky Way Over the Spanish Peaks (2016 May 24)

by Chris Peterson » Tue May 24, 2016 3:25 pm

neufer wrote:
Chris Peterson wrote:
jisles wrote:
It's Rho Ophiuchi, not Rho Ophiuchus. Use the genitive of the constellation name.
That's certainly a common convention. Personally, I choose not to use dead language genitives in most cases. Rho Ophiuchus makes more sense, and is clearer to more people. I consider it the preferred usage. I encourage others to modernize our astronomical terminology by their usage, as well.
  • So then is the closest star system Alpha Centaurus :?:
Indeed, it is. Although it's not unreasonable to use "Alpha Centauri" for the simple reason that it's become a proper name in its own right, divorced from its original genitive derivation. There are a handful of famous stars in that category.

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