Starship Asterisk*

Great example of the reddish tint of the moon (warm toned, not cool toned). It looks like the Earth has an edge mask applied; I would have expected to see a fuzzy limb of our planet.

Airglow can be either smooth across the sky, with a peak brightness at around 12 degrees above the horizon (under good transparency), or it can be skewed to one side. Interestingly, I saw the most skewed airglow ever last year at the Nebraska Star Party. It can also be banded, seem to brighten in on...

It's hard to get an accurate idea of the relative distance to each of the two most pronounced light sources given the obstructions and the low perspective. They may be similar distances - both of them are roughly the same distance from the bottom of the frame - then again they may not! When you mak...

Using stellarium centered in on Sigulda, Latvia, on Dec 28th 2008 it looks like the pictures were taken at around 12 to 12:30am (the bright stars on the 3rd picture, just left of center that are aligned nearly vertical are Deneb and Sadr, Vega is in the lower right). The APOD picture appears to hav...

This is most likely turbulence caused by turbulence in a shear zone between the still air on the ground and moving air above. If this were true, then the fans would appear at a constant height above the ground, not an angular height relative to the observer. As you can barely see from the backgroun...

The microlensing suggestion is cleaver but I don't agree and I'd like to point out some observations. First, the scattering produces a "virtual" column, and scattering takes place all along the site path. The pillars are commonly attributed to horizontal oriented ice crystals. You will als...