Starship Asterisk*

I also thought it was interesting - both the picture and the posts we see here. The post piques my curiosity about QR codes. The posts in the forum here make me think it's probably a good thing that we're unlikely to make contact with aliens any time soon. It would be deeply embarrassing. Any race t...

This is most likely turbulence caused by turbulence in a shear zone between the still air on the ground and moving air above. If this were true, then the fans would appear at a constant height above the ground, not an angular height relative to the observer. Yes, that's a good point. It's hard to g...

I think you're right that the density of ice crystals would have a visual effect, but I think that the effect would be on the brightness of the pillar rather than the width. If you imagine that every crystal is exactly horizontal then you will only get light reflected to your eye from crystals that ...

Look at the whole picture! How many vertical wind tunnels have they put into this town? If any owls fly over they're going to end up in orbit!!

The light is being reflected from the underside of a horizontally aligned flat ice crystal so I think we can exclude any kind of lensing, diffraction or interference effects. We have to remember that the lights are not directional so light is spreading from the source in all directions equally. Beca...

Have you tried to imagine how the night sky might look if your home star happened to be somewhere along that string?!? You would have a faint "milky way", which would be the string as it stretched away across the sky. At each end of the "milky way" would be a vast galaxy stretchi...

At this point, I'd like to say thanks very much to you guys for discussing the issue :D Don't stop! The issues you've raised are exactly the ones that caused me to post the topic in the first place. If the picture portrayed ordinary stars in collision then I'd have just shrugged it off as an inadequ...

It's all very intriguing! There is a good (but possibly ageing) newbie intro to Neutron stars here: http://www.astro.umd.edu/~miller/nstar.html I'd read it previously and re-read it again before posting my original question here. Plenty of information about the internals and dynamics of neutron star...

Okay, I feel kind of funny asking questions like these about an artist's conception of a cosmic event. I'm not trying to be picky... the pictures excited my curiosity and I seek enlightenment. 1) The two neutron stars are depicted as being basically spherical and devoid of any material exchange such...

Is it possible to get better pictures? We really need a proper bitmap with a 1:1 pixel mapping. These JPEGS are useless for the kind of detailed examination we are all trying to do. Even when you view the picture at it's normal 100% enlargement you can see JPEG artefacts all over the place! It gets ...

I'm one of the (nearly) silent audience of APOD... but if APOD were to be discontinued then one source of beauty and wonder in my life would be ended with it. Planetary nebulae (eg October 17, 2004) are the ideal illustration of both; they are beautiful but they also beg the question of how they cou...