Starship Asterisk*

Meh! Tell me this is not the best image this lander can produce!! Not long ago I went outside with my circa 2007 digital camera and lens combination that together cost me about $1,500 retail, and with Photoshop on my PC made a 17566 x 4049 pixel panorama of the view of my entire front yard in which...

What beauty and wonder to see the world through digital eyes better than our own and so easily able to compress time so as to animate the sky and Earth.

-Noel

neufer wrote:Now it's repeated the feat, with Curiosity.

Wow, the feats of precision just keep on coming! No doubt this was planned.

I think it's amazing that we have Mars instrumented so well as to be able to photograph one probe with another.

Just wow.

-Noel

Wow, I love how the star trails are equidistant from the horizon all the way around. They are right on the pole! How does a station on the South Pole maintain information connectivity to the rest of the world? No geostationary satellites are visible. Do they bounce signals off other satellites that ...

What a gorgeous image, Wally! Thank you for taking us all out there along with you.

-Noel

Makes me worried when the Nasa engineers can't sync a simple audio track to the video track on a 5 minute youtube video. Lets hope they did a better job on the 7 minute landing sequence. I wonder if Vegas has a betting pool for this landing? There's nothing wrong with the audio/video sync. Chances ...

Ambitious and impressive! Best of luck.

Did anyone else see/get this little joke?
As a software engineer I got a good laugh out of it.

-Noel

What a stunning photo!

Lightning in itself is horrific. But next to an erupting volcano it seems almost an afterthought, along the lines of "that's the least you have to worry about today".

Really brings a sense of perspective.

-Noel

neufer wrote:The Westerlund 1 super star cluster has never gotten an APOD

ESO image of same: http://archive.org/details/CHAN-118

-Noel

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2009/32/fastfacts/ 14.3 hours of total exposure time on the Hubble! 170,000 light-years distant!! It images things in other galaxies that we can only barely image this well in our galaxy via other means. What a wonderful piece of equipment. -Noel

I've always wondered about these types of telescopes...

They're outside, yet use optical mirrors. Clearly they must get dirty. Do they hose them down occasionally?

-Noel

How did I miss this before?

A wonderful, interesting picture of an uncommon conjunction. Congratulations, Alex!

-Noel

Simply beautiful, with rich, vibrant color - and not oversharpened!

-Noel

in general, trying to disentangle time and space to figure out whether an event has occurred at a point in spacetime we are causally disconnected from serves little purpose, and usually leads to confusion. Therein lies the rub. We are causally connected. We observe things out there because the ligh...

gcal wrote:am I the only one who thinks that's not astronomy?

Well, it's what astronomers quite often see when they look up to see the stars.

I don't think I'm the only one who thinks it's good we have an atmosphere.



-Noel

Most people look at this in wonder.

State Farm execs look at this and think: "Note to self: Exclude sinkholes in future Mars policies"

-Noel

The discussion section of this apod puzzles me; it says: "The pillars of creation were imaged again in 2007 by the orbiting Spitzer Space Telescope in infrared light, leading to the conjecture that the pillars may already have been destroyed by a local supernova, but light from that event has ...

Neat stuff, though I wonder why not post it on a site or in a way that the video can be viewed carefully frame by frame, back and forth? I found it interesting the way the ionized path pulsated several times after the brilliant main stroke, and I would have liked to see how it ended - do they just f...

Speaking about colors, note that the gaseous region near the Trapezium (the small cluster of blue-white stars responsible for ionizing the Orion Nebula) is greenish-white in color. Ann, that's what I first came here to comment about, before being distracted by Owlice's comment above. The bright Tra...

Dr. Gendler, I'm quite dismayed and disappointed to read your post; I thought you better than that. Owlice, I'm sorry to say that you're out of line in this response. The APOD image on the main page is indeed oversharpened, and Rob is quite right to point it out. It turns a beatiful, subtle image i...

I noticed the satellite galaxy near the central bulge (which I do see hints of), at 11 o'clock as geckzilla puts it. Is the one further away at 8 o'clock really a satellite, or a coincidental alignment of a distant spiral? That's a good question. Surely someone must have spectral data for these, so ...

I'd love to see more folks participate in this. Maybe popping it back to the top of the list will elicit some more interest...

Edit: Oops! Looks like the source images are gone.

-Noel

A few years back I constructed a composite image from a whole bunch of Hubble photos and came up with this:



-Noel

Heh, after broadcasting into space that we have 9 planets, the IAU still felt it necessary to demote Pluto.

Ah well, the invasion force will probably just pass us by... "No, that's not them, there are only 8 planets there."

-Noel

Chris Peterson wrote:

Click to view full size image

Somehow that looks familiar.

-Noel