Starship Asterisk*

I have seen another description of the image say it is actually about 30 degrees across:
http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/ContentMedia/990047b.jpg

Dunno which is correct.

Maybe if there is some odd heat source hitting the moon in that direction or emanating from the ridge? I think they probably did some thermal imaging on it and any odd heat sources would have been detected though. IIRC, the dark areas were just all slightly warmer than the white areas with some slig...

I'm not quite sure what you mean, aurora.

It's odd that they don't mention that, even to decide to dismiss it as coincidence.

Interesting. The article mentions both the dark substance and the ridge but does not suggest any relation between the two. I'm a little disappointed.

Hm, I have never seen that before. Guess I never cared to have it on my desktop. It's not open source so there's not much to look at. Sorry. :\

can you link to whatever you are using that allows you to have that on your desktop?

I can't reproduce it either, but I'm still willing to bet it's due to the malformed HTML on the APOD page. There's nothing you can really do about it except hope the editor reads about your plight and takes pity.

This is hard, they don't line up as well as it looks like they do. I ended up distorting the Viking image a lot.

How can you think of picking up your kids when you have the important task of solving the mystery of where the Universe came from and where it is going? Don't they realize they can walk home? Get back to your job here. While you are at it, please explain hiccups.

Aliens have placed giant mirrors in space in order to see what their own galaxy looks like. Since the mirrors are some distance away from the galaxies they are reflecting, the "mirror" image looks slightly different rather than an exact duplicate because the light from the mirror took so m...

No.

That's the thing, I'm not exactly sure, since I haven't ever seen for sure non-lossy images to compare. What they look like are interpolated jpegs to me, but I can't be certain. I decided to make a simulated image, just to try to illustrate my point, which is that any artifacts can distort small spe...

I contacted Stefan and this is what he had to say about it. :) I don't think I have to play a defendant role. But please allow me some annotations: 1. The red/orange/yellow color of a Sunset is *NOT* caused by the Sun, but by the atmosphere. The same colors happens with the Moon. However, the Moon i...

This is a little off topic, but I'm curious to see if you know anything about this, Chris. http://galaxyzoo.org/ There is a huge image they seem to use with lots of galaxies on it but it seems as though the image has multiple levels of jpeg artifacts on it. Instead of having the huge source image as...

It might have something to do with the fact that APOD uses paragraph tags but never actually closes them... bad html.

Vision, I don't think we've had telescopes that are capable of letting us view other galaxies for long enough to observe it. Even if we had telescopes 10,000 years ago, cameras didn't get invented until just a few hundred years ago, and photographic cameras only started to come around a little over ...

Norval, right or wrong, you are an old codger.

Well, tell it to alter some cherries into it then.

No, they don't exist. Only fractions do. It's like trying to prove something with a thousand decimals of pi when you really should have just used the number pi to begin with.

What about the happy cartoon lizard between them?

Yeah, I was thinking this morning at work that I screwed that up, the article I hate is 1=.999... which I guess they changed it to just .999... I refuse to acknowledge that .999... even exists

Hah, yeah, it's either say nothing, say something off topic, or dispute its accuracy or promote some form of conspiracy theory. I was going to say the music in the first one was cheesier than a cheeseball dipped in cheez whiz and subsequently coated in tiny cheeseballs but decided it would be asinin...

Come on, get it right, I'm the one questioning your commas. Mak defended your use of them!

I imagine that it is orange for the same reason the sun turns orange when its light shines through the atmosphere near the horizon. I think the sky in that photo is orange from the setting sun in the western sky, which means that the sun is in front of the camera, so what's shinning on the moon to ...