Starship Asterisk*

Is the apparent bulge of the Earth in this APOD real or an artifact of the picture?

A little research into why these clusters don't collapse resulted in: This means that over time, the massive stars will tend to slow down, and the light stars will tend to speed up. If a star is slowing down, then gravity gets to take over, and does indeed pull that star down, closer to the core of ...

Infinity anyone?

I believe that there is more to consider than just the moon's elliptical orbit when considering it's apparent brightness. Like the sun, the moon changes its position in the sky with the seasons. Unlike the sun, the (full) moon is highest in the sky during winter, and lowest in the sky during summer....

There was not that much snow in Alaska in August. The baseline ground picture, possibly a composite, was taken in winter.

I saw one that was a little different:
really big -> No
moving -> Yes
quickly -> No
blinking -> No
jumping around, left, right, up down -> Yes

It is a meteorite that is coming directly at you!

I see that there are now some plausible explanations for the Voyager and Pioneer anomalies, or gradual slowing of the crafts. Has NASA come to a final conclusion on this as to whether it is heat or termination shock related?

I much prefer the polarized 3D versions but I don't think that they can be easily implemented on LCD screens.

From the provided Thunder link: Thunder contains a somewhat cylindrical initial pressure shock wave along the lightning channel in excess of 10 times the normal atmospheric pressure. This shock wave decays rapidly into a sound wave within feet or meters. When thunder is heard from about 328 feet (10...

I wonder how the asymmetric thrust is balanced?

I did not know that Mars is 50% farther from the Sun than Earth. ~150 * .5 = 75. 75 + 150 = 225, almost exactly the ~228 million kilometers that mars averages. That is not a coincidence. Thanks.

The green mist in the sky exactly correlates with white edge of the rising tide. It is a camera artifact of light reflecting from the white edge of the water and then being picked up by a long exposure. The green mist in the sky moves exactly perpendicular to the green light being reflected off of t...

I'm on the map!

http://snekpete.com/stuff/iss.jpg

Synchrones (long dashed lines) trace the location of dust grains released from the comet nucleus at the same time and with zero velocity

Zero velocity relative to the Sun.

Would we recognize a random distribution of the microwave background if we saw it? Random most definitely does not imply uniform, a random distribution will show patterns of high and low concentrations, just not in any predictable way.

I looked for this comet last evening. It is too dim to be visible, at least easily, from my location. I will look again tonight.

Best picture that I've seen, thanks. I agree with neufer , an event of this magnitude is probaly more common than every 100 years. In my youth, when I sometimes stayed up all night and stayed outdoors, I saw two large meteorites. One split in half as it steaked across the sky and one I could hear.

Great job on a very difficult, expensive and risky mission to land such a large piece of harware on Mars, I didn't think NASA could do it. This just might be the 'big one', to discover life on another planet.

I stand corrected! After further thought, indeed the left and right are reversed when looking at the moon from Northern and Southern hemisphers. Learned something new, thanks.

Judging from how the crescent Moon at far right is illuminated in this image (it is illuminated on its left side), the image seems to be taken in the morning, and the dark blue Earth shadow is sinking as the Sun is rising. Hahaa! You're wrong! Argentina is in the southern hemisphere where everythin...

Odd that no sunspots are visible, this was at the middle of the last solar cycle.

It looks like the Grumpy Old Man angered some viewers again, oh well. People are such creatures of habit. I enjoyed the post, it's different. And thanks to <b>wavelet</b> for the decoder. I would like to know exactly how the image is parsed, I'm guessing by pixels? It must be some sort of binary. Th...

Very entertaining and inspiring video. My guess for the lights is the ubiquitous automobile.

Did you know that the new moon always sets at sunset and the full moon always rises at sunset?

It took me a while to translate the sweeping, rotating motion of the horizon into the rotation of a sphere. I learned to picture the center of rotation, off of the screen, and that helped. Sometimes the motion, or horizon, rotated left, as if you were in a plane doing a steep turn to the right. Some...