Starship Asterisk*

Happy Pi Day.

These filaments are very dim. The brighter ones are visible to the eye through a telescope, barely, and largely because we detect the faint contrast with the surrounds. If we were closer, it would not be brighter, but we'd lose that contrast. If we were at the nebula, we'd see nothing. Analogous to...

What is HOS Foraxx (bottom left corner)?

As a warmup, an annular solar eclipse will be visible later this year -- in mid-October. https://c.tadst.com/gfx/eclipses2/20231014/path2d-380.png The October eclipse is unusually friendly to many more countries. Lots of people should be able to enjoy that one, including Central and South America.

The striped bands are called airglow and they result from air high in Earth's atmosphere being excited by the Sun's light and emitting a faint light of its own. The bands cross the entire sky … Even at the best ground-based observatories, airglow limits the photosensitivity of optical telescopes. P...

Still, I hope we get to see some innovations in future missions that try methods of removing dust from solar panels. Even if such a method works only once, then it could double the lifetime. “Planned lifetime” is a way to limit engineering efforts/experiments and lander weight. Dust on solar panels ...

Ross Pomeroy of Real Clear Scienc e wrote: 4. What's Up With Jupiter? […] Moreover, he writes, most gas giants in other solar systems have tight, eccentric orbits around their stars, while Jupiter's is wide and nearly circular. "Only about one in a hundred stars like the Sun has a Jupiter like...

The Open Exoplanet Catalog currently lists 4769 confirmed exoplanets.
The NASA Exoplanet Archive currently lists 5069 confirmed exoplanets.
The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia currently lists 5147 confirmed exoplanets.
All these also have a backlog of unconfirmed candidates.

Ann wrote: ↑Fri May 13, 2022 8:51 amJust 10 light-minutes? That's just a little bigger than the radius of the Earth's orbit around the Sun.

That makes the ring itself roughly the size of the Mercury orbit.

“This means something. This is important.” – Roy Neary

https://i.imgur.com/opxyf69.png Does anybody know if that beautiful bright golden star to the left in the photo is H14511? HD 14511, yes. An 8.8 magnitude G5 star¹ at 444 parsec (1448 light-years) distance, as derived from Gaia data . (Previous estimates put it farther away.) [¹ thought to be a bin...

What a creative composition! I like it.

Ann wrote: ↑Sun Apr 11, 2021 1:22 pmWhat gets me about today's APOD is the "silence" of the creation of the final, larger black hole collision product.

As you probably know, the signal has been converted to audible wavelengths, to let us hear a ‘chirp’ sound of the merger.
https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/video/ligo20160211v2

A tough one, so close to the setting Sun, so close to the horizon. On the other hand, this one is not about planetary surface details.

https://i.imgur.com/yRZppGc.jpg There is one more planet in the image: Uranus. The image also captures four more interesting but originally unlabeled deep sky objects. The planet Uranus is listed in Stellarium as magnitude 5.69 at the time of the photo. Open cluster NGC 1342 is also known as the Li...

The VLA (along with Arecibo) is also known to be featured somewhat prominently in the movie Contact. (The movie Contact itself is based on Carl Sagan’s novel of the same name.)

So I take it that the other dots are confirmed to not be planets of that system then? Background stars or artefacts?

Very cool, ESO team!

A nice ‘S’ for the galactic alphabet.

Perhaps not a very popular nebula, but it has been featured here before:
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap180109.html
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap130826.html
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap980325.html
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap960117.html

What a beautiful and creative composition!

I watched the webcast yesterday from timeanddate.com with several feeds along the path, and what struck me first was how thin the ‘ring of fire’ was, compared to other recent annular eclipses.

Can't resist comparing the magnetic streamlines of the Milky Way with the post-impressionist swirly painting style of Van Gogh.

When zoomed in, the individual exposures seem to be resolved. Fascinating! Not sure why they’re stripes instead of dots.

From the angle of the arcs (about 24.5°), I deduce 98 minutes between beginning and end.

For orientation:

orin stepanek wrote: ↑Wed Feb 05, 2020 12:21 pmBut I guess it was known before the event!

It wasn’t.
Moon Struck - 25 January 2019 - APOD

Mars looks very bright in this picture. Was Mars actually close to Earth when this picture was taken? Or does Mars look so bright because it was just so much brighter than the tiny little comet? According to Stellarium, Mars was at mag 0.87 and 1.632 AU distance, at that time. Mars can be at mag -2...