Starship Asterisk*

Since Pan orbits in the Encke gap along with an irregular ringlet, a hypothesis for the hat brim occurs to me: It is picking up "snow" from this ringlet along its "equator" of spin. Pan's gravity must be very low, so ring snow could pile high. An overall snow layer may also accou...

Notice that Uranus is not circular. It looks to be in gibbous phase, but that cannot be because it's in virtually the same direction as the moon in opposition. No, this is an aberration caused by the optics of the telescope itself, and is of course most prevalent at the edges of the field.

Beyond wrote:I was waiting to see if anyone commented on the one in the 3 o'clock position that seems to make a 90' turn. I thought that was a bit strange. What in space makes right angles?

Exactly my question. I mean, whuh??
That should be the subject of a whole discussion if not a research project.

RedFishBlueFish: I wondered about that too. It can't be a crater. It almost looks like an asteroid impact only a few hours old. I'm surprised it wasn't mentioned by the editor.

Yes, we see sunlight on Saturn's face. Imagine you're Saturn and you're wearing a broad-brimmed hat. You pull the hat down against the sunlight. Now, are you looking at the dark side of the brim? Yes.

Interesting to note that not a single one of the firefly trails is convex upward. They all seem to flash as they're pulling out of a dive. I wonder if anyone has studied the coordination of their flashes with their flight patterns? (As a process engineer I've learned to look for subtle clues, and I ...

Ann notices that astronomers have concentrated on low-mass stars, but this one has a higher mass. That's because the first exoplanet searches were limited to Doppler shifts of the star, and the smaller the star (and larger and closer the planet) the greater the shift. So the ones showing up first we...

It is unlikely that any particular crater would be double-drilled, but considering the number of craters observed and our penchant for finding patterns and symmetry, it is just as unlikely that we wouldn't have found this rare occurrence. The "clue" about the smoother interior region could...

I'm curious about the yellow "donuts" around the perimeter of this composite. Notice that the reddish stars show diffraction spikes as we'd expect with a narrow-band filter and negligible aberrations. This is true (for at least some) all the way to the edge of the field, so I doubt off-axi...