Starship Asterisk*

Pictures like that really make you want to know, eh? Man, first contact will be a party if and when it happens. My reasoned guess as to why no galaxies appear in the photo is that the exposure time was too short. If a higher-power telescope were trained on an apparently black portion of the photo fo...

How nieve it is to assume that ALL objects are traveling at hyper velocities. :roll: Think about it. And no, a planet or large moon can't "sneak up" on asteroids traveling at almost the same velocity and gently sweep them up. Guess then our solar system just couldn't have been formed by t...

Aren’t all objects beyond a certain distance would come into focus at the setting of “infinity”? That's right: light rays from astronomically distant objects are parallel for all intents and purposes. A telescope focused to infinity will form clear images of anything out there, regardless of distan...

How nieve it is to assume that ALL objects are traveling at hyper velocities. :roll: Think about it. Thinking about it, a small gravitating body (an asteroid) "at infinity" (very, very far away) from a much larger body (a moon) will have zero gravitational potential energy by definition, ...

Maybe this is a stupid question, but why are all of the craters round? Why did none of the meteors impact at an angle and make an oblong or oval crater? Maybe I just need to go back to work. :wink: I wondered about that too after reading about it in Lucifer's Hammer (comet impact disaster novel). A...

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap070720.html

It is obvious now that you've pointed it out! I didn't notice the opposition effect in that photo, but I did notice it on a beach near sunset. Will snap a photo next time.

The lines you're talking about are called diffraction spikes if they're produced by mirror supports. CCD saturation produces somewhat similar-looking artifacts called saturation trails: http://www.sc.eso.org/~ohainaut/ccd/ P.S. Delysid23, I'm in Vancouver for the summer :) going to see the Symphony ...

The mounting point label is hilarious!

iamlucky13 wrote:[...] the empty 747 alone weighs 323,000 pounds (about 150,000 kg) [...]

BMAONE23 wrote:Fuel Capacity
47,210 gallons (316,307 lbs) jet fuel

is it common for planes to carry their own weight in jet fuel?
How is the shuttle attached to the carrier? Bolts?

Hmm... I sure hope nobody mixes up the next APOD with some snaps of a recent high-res supermodel photo shoot

That may very well be true--except that the area of a sphere is not equal the the area of a circle with the diameter of the sphere. If this is the level of thought that people on this forum exhibit, there's no point in wasting my time in trying to ask questions on it. Oh please . Don't you think as...

The Sun's spectrum is very, very different from that of the energy-producing reactions taking place in the Sun's interior: pp fusion produces hard gamma rays, which, over millions of years, are attenuated to lower energies as they make their way to the surface. The solar spectrum ends up being very ...

Happy Birthday, APOD! You're like the visually fascinating and Universe-sized 12-year-old sibling I never had.

aside: two of my housemates and one of my coworkers share APOD's birthday (but not year)

I can't tell whether that's a running light or a reflection of sunlight, but nice catch if it iturns out to be reversed! One way to sort out the port & starboard directions and colours is to group the words according to relative length: red is left is port, green is right is starboard. Almost lo...

If the sum of the angular momentum vectors of all observable spiral galaxies are not (close to) zero, then the Universe has a net rotation, which should be observable in the cosmic microwave background, but no such anisotropy has been found... Isn't it impossible to be able to define an 'absolute' d...

NoelC, that's awesome! Laughed out loud

Hell, for all we know we really COULD be in a hyper complex computer simulation, and the laws of physics as we observe them are just manifestations of the implementation and processor speed. :roll: -Noel perhaps Saturn's north polar hexagon is due to the planet's poly count having been capped to sp...

Application: Imagine a super massive star 20 light years away that has a high probability of going hyper-nova. An entanglement source is place 10 light years out directly between the solar system and the star, if/when the star goes hyper-nova, the detector could give 20 years of advanced warning be...

For those without red-blue glasses, click the 'stereo' button twice to see two similar figures rotating side by side, then cross your eyes just enough so that you see three images, and focus on the middle one, which will be formed by an overlap of the two original images. (The stereographic effect m...

On QM, I do believe it is a very incomplete theory, and I look forward to the day (probably not in my lifetime) when the uncertainties will be removed and the theory will be made deterministic. To my mind and thinking, that will not occur until more dimensions are involved. Quantum Cosmology is yet...

aichip wrote:geysers are presently erupting there now

Quick question: do you have any evidence of these geysers beyond images of holes in the ground, or did I miss something? Were you thinking of the South polar CO2 geysers?

It's cloudy in Toronto where I am Be careful and let us know if you can see it!

That was an APOD almost 2 years ago
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap050401.html

Sorry about reviving an old topic, but I kind of forgot about it, never answered, and saw it again just now... By saying the changes in the image are due to light rather than structure, I meant that the swirling motions and brightness differences seen in the two pictures are due to the light echo mo...

Phobos orbits about 6000 km above Mars's surface, which is about one Mars diameter; the planet's already tenuous atmosphere probably wouldn't present much resistance. However, Phobos orbits Mars faster than Mars itself rotates (and, importantly, in the direction of Mars's rotation). Consequently, th...

Hi jimsaruff, I read the evolution thread, and personally I'm fine with usage of the term in astronomy; as one poster (Qev?) pointed out in there, the term "evolution" predates its biological meaning, and can mean to change, develop, form, etc. Deeply ingrained astronomy terms like "s...