Starship Asterisk*

What you write ("bleeding into...") is exactly what I meant. The dark spot in the center (the Moon) looks smaller in the picture than it is in real life.

The dark spot is too small. At the time of the eclipse, the angular distance between Venus and Jupiter was about 45 degrees. I enlarged the photo on my screen until the distance was 45 centimeters. At that scale the sun/moon disk should be half a centimeter in diameter (5 millimeters), but the dark ...

Yes, that is a possible explanation, but I wonder if there could be something else at play here, namely the camera itself. If I enlarge your second photo (by Thanakrit), the dark lunar disk is significally smaller than the sun disk, as displayed before or after the eclipse.

Why is there a small dark spot in the middle of the sun (that isn't there to see)? I have seen this curious phenomenon in some of my own amateur photos (taken during other eclipses).

Has the Webb telescope ever taken a picture like this one, from its position in Lagrange point far outside the moon's orbit?
Or is it not possible because of its construction, or even forbidden because of the Sun sitting in that direction?

I think the ripples are shock waves, and are not caused by "pockets of relatively hot or rarefied air deflecting moonlight less strongly than pockets of relatively cool or compressed air.." I agree. The given explanation sounds too fancifully conceived. What pockets? Where did they come f...

Sorry but they don't look the same color to me, with or without the bridge. Not even close, one is definitely lighter, one darker. But that's the whole point of an optic illusion ! - In this case: that they "don't look the same color", but yet they are. If you measure the color in the two...

Thank you, Steve and Christian! I think I would appreciate this "hidden galaxy" a lot more, and also appreciate the efforts behind revealing its appearance, if I could also be shown what it looks like when it is hidden --that is what it looks like before filtering and manipulating noise an...

Similar photos of this galaxy have been published eight times (see Archive!); always with the title "IC 342: Hidden Galaxy". I have nothing against this galaxy, but I would like to see just how it is "hidden". Each time the caption claims it is only glimpsed through the veil of s...

The idea this time was, I guess, to show the difference in size by giving us the chance to compare it to the older photo.

Certainly a very nice asteroid! Something struck me about the legend to the photo – it's an unsystematic mixture of metric and Imperial units: ... a distance of just over 400 kilometers ... at 4.5 kilometer per second or around 10,000 miles per hour ... less than 800 meters (about 0.5 miles) ... onl...

I reacted when I read about the "atmospheric methane that absorbs infrared light". But, in order to be seen by Webb, it is not enough that it absorbs infrared light. It also has to emit infrared light. Right?

Phobos doesn't look so dark to me. Maybe a darker shade of gray should have been used to color the moon.

The star in the upper left hand corner has a double star effect from the JW camera. Is this an anomaly or is it bc there are actually 2 stars really close to each other? I just noticed that, too. It must be a double star, either an optical double or a visual binary. They seem to have about the same...

"On Jupiter, light-colored clouds are usually higher up than dark clouds."

The same goes for earth, I think. Isn't just because clouds higher up get more light than the ones deeper down?
- Which are in more shadow than the ones on top, of course.
As simple as that?

Couldn't one reason for the flat rocks be that they are flat because they are sedimentary rocks?

As someone has already pointed out, the backward link in the APOD of March 1, is in error. It points to a date that has not yet occurred!

Can anything interesting be said about the white stars in the lower right? They are just a couple of stars in our galaxy, I guess. But one of them is double.

I definitely agree with Ann 100%. In this international age, when all kinds of alphabets are available on the Internet, it is perfectly posssible to spell the geographical names Östersund anf Frösön correctly in a text that reaches all corners of the world!

Thanx, XgeoX!

What is the sharp line doing -- to the left of the tail, visible as a black line in the negative?

… "mosiac" in the accompaying text, could be changed to "mosaic"…

The beautiful Chopin music ended rather abruptly. Fade-out would've been more considerate.

Actually, if Scorpius looked like that to the unaided eye, we would hardly see any constellation at all, for all the flesh-colored masses of gas and other stuff...

I can't figure out what the two black shadows are – the circular shapes that hide Jupiter's left and right parts.