Starship Asterisk*

Funny thing... When I first saw it I very briefly got the distinct image of innumerable dark space-suited scientists pouring out of spacecraft to go see English has never been the language my parents taught me nor it was used at primary school. When i was 12 years old, English lessons became part o...

It would have to be aimed precisely toward us; Eta Carinae might not be so much of a direct thread to us. WR104 is more frightening. besides it would have a narrow beam and still it is about 8000ly away. The angle of the beam is ≅ 0.2 radian. The characteristic width of the bundle would be approx. ...

I was meaning an alignment of the naked eye planets, (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn, Jupiter), as were shown in the second and third links I included. I was mostly just wondering if something like that would be occurring again in my lifetime No problem. Since you want a conjunction between outer and...

Anyway, anyone know when this may happen again, or care to point me in the direction of where I could find this info? Thanks in advance. Since the synodic rotation period of Venus is 583.92 days and the synodic rotation period of Mercury is 115.88 days, it would not escape your notice that Tsyn of ...

The soil/sand below the water/co2 ice must be dark, very dark if it is the materail thrown upwards by the geysirs. If the ice was transparent, The ice of carbon dioxide i know is milky white, not as transparent as water ice. Maybe there exists a transparent form of CO2 ice at pressures as low as on...

Are there processes on earth that create these similar outward bursts on this same type of frozen dune? I lack the experience with frozen dunes, the last time i saw frozen dunes, was in 1963, in my childhood. What i can tell from a more recent experience: an odd five years ago experiments were perf...

Like Art Neufer brought to our attention, the Miller-Urey experiment produced roughly equally distributed amounts of L and D amino acids. On earth and in meteorites predominantly L amino acids are present. Refering to the circular polarisation of the IR light as a source for a preference for L or D ...

So when Henk graciously offers the solution to my request, I am unable to utilize it because of my ignorance of the words he uses. Having been using a computer since 94, and having a couple dozen websites I maintain, I still do not know what a Matlab is, where to find it (I tried), or how to start ...

Doug, a simple script in Matlab, in order to add a scale bar to an image. 1) Save the apod picture with your browser on your local disk 2) Start Matlab 3) Run the script 4) Answer the questions It will display the image with a scale bar. The code is below. It isn't rocket science, neither very elega...

Although deviating from the original topic: the mice, dark matter seems to be a key argument in galactic collisions. Energy and momentum of each galaxy is transfered into internal motion, due to dark matter. This leads to a larger relative occurence of merging galaxies than would have been visible w...

I'm *guessing* that the uneffected galaxy is a non rotating & much heavier elliptical galaxy. The stars, which bear a resemblence to a spiral arm (right of the rightmost galaxy), what are these? Are these in the the null plane There exists a null plane between the two galaxies (though closer to...

Either mice of tadpoles, what is happening to these galaxies? The right galaxy seems to be rather intact, at least the rightmost half of it. I imagine that we are aligned in the plane of its spiral arms. The left galaxy has been stripped significantly from its spiral arms, only some stumps remain, c...

At 5h45 in western Netherlands two minutes of somewhat less thick clouds. The moon made the clouds glow a little, no details could be seen. The glow was asymmetric, as in the last quarter lunation phase. The next thicker layers of stratus were waiting to obscure the moon and the glow did not reappear.

Moon Slide Slim? Are the APOD folks running out of good titles? Repetition is the art of teaching. For those covered by cloudy skies, it is nice to have an image; the forcast for tomorrow here is cloudy, the moon will be obscured by low stratus. In more than 40 years the wheather favoured maybe 5 e...

Art, Aren't you yourself arguing against black hole "dust panning" interstellar space due to a general lack of cool gas. Thats right, i never forget that my concepts can be wrong, so approach it from the opposite direction: "suppose its true, then X and Y must be valid, but since we s...

What puzzles me, why an old elliptical system is emitting so much X-ray radiation. In an elliptical system there is hardly any cold gas left for new stars to be formed ( http://heritage.stsci.edu/2008/07/caption.html ) /heritage.stsci.edu/2008/07/caption.html�http://heritage.stsci.edu/2008/07/captio...

What I want to know is this: Why is the gravitational lens refracting the light so perfectly? Noel, Light is bend around a havy object, since its mass deforms the space around it. Albert Einstein predicted it, and the solar eclips of 1919 was used to test his hypothesis. Eddington published the res...

The anomaly remains, the enigma continues, broken up space rocks didn't make these CS types of crater chains, , , , , so what did? The answer we propose "nobody" wants to talk about, or even consider. Norval, Thanks, your comment would have made my math teacher (+-1965) proud. Breaking up...

While researching CS types of crater chains for the past six years, CS means Concise and Systematic, FieryIce (Ms Gale Smart of BC Canada) and I have inadvertently become somewhat knowledgeable about craters and their formations. Maybe you can enlighten the enigma for crater chains to us/me. As far...

What are some of the key earth weather effects from the 11 year sun cycle? Well, next statement has a limited validity: There seems to be a slight preference for the Azore high to extend or drift to more northern latitudes, when the sun is at his maximum activity. "So i was told", in the ...

[quote="g-banjo"]I don't see a horizontal fault line.[/quote] Basically parallel to the seam in the two pictures. I was puzzled a bit, but did you notice that all craters are imposed onto the rays? Without more detail i can not find any craters which are overlayed by any rays. IMHO the ray...