Starship Asterisk*

just wanted to wish everyone that works on the fantastic pictures a big happy birthday. 20 years and I think I have been with you as long!!!

absolutely, completely mind blowing. it puts a complete new view of what and where I live, and how insignificant we are in the scheme of things. WOW. CUDOS TO THOSE THAT PUT THIS TOGETHER!!! I am so impressed.

Diplodocus wrote:How can one picture a day amount to over a billion picture in 18 years? You must miscalculate the number!
There's several orders of magnitude difference!

duh! pictures posted X people viewing = aprox 1 billion.

BIG SHOUT OUT FOR YOUR BIRTHDAY!!! HERE IS TO YOUR NEXT EIGHTEEN, TOM.

I am always amazed by the images that are submitted here on APOD. due to having three strokes, (one of which has affected my eye sight) I'm unable to view our beautiful galaxy using a telescope so I rely on APOD to show me what I'm missing out on. That being said I would like to suggest a hypothesis...

ok, found out what it means. thanks.

the information did help me understand what they are used for, now if i could only figure out what this one means!!!

i understand the long duration (32 sec) exposure causing the star streaks, but that doesn't explain the streaks going in different directions. the streaks should be either all going in the same direction or no streak at all if the camera is moving toward those stars... tom

what an incredible picture! it takes your breath away, and to be able to use one of my direction arrows on my keyboard after enlarging the picture to its max and move slowly through 300 light years of the image with so much going on in it is just awsome. wow...

just curious as to the size of the sun spot as compared to earth??? tom

thanks for the info. i would love to see another meteor storm like the last, it was the greatest!!!

is there a possibility that comet homes huge ejection will give us a meteor storm like we had three or 4 years ago?

amen to that, noel. ( your last line!)

i had the great fortune to be in the las vegas area during the last great meteor storm ( i think it was winter 2004 ). the view of all those meteors falling at the same time was awsome. unfortunately i didn't have a camera that could take time exposures, now i do. when can we expect another meteor s...

thank you both for the answers. i just couldn't get my head around the fact that even though the cluster looks tightly packed that there is still that much distance between stars, amazing!!! i bet the view looking at our galaxy from the cluster has got to be intense. tom.[/b]

if our sun and earth were somewhere in the middle of the cluster what would we see and would it be light 24 hrs a day???