Starship Asterisk*

this "ingenious" picture is an appalling piece of pseudoscience. the fact that some posters here don't clearly see why confirms the confusion this "document" will create. clearly, the APOD editorial fascination with star trail photographs has overruled better judgment. take the p...

We're certainly detecting more multiple planet systems now. And we're certainly missing many planets. That's to be expected, and as the statistical base continues to develop, we have a better idea what the actual counts are likely to be. absolutely. sci fi journalism and artistic blue sky views of ...

lurid and dripping like melting crayons, that is the ugliest rendering of the orion nebula i have ever seen. absolutely dreadful. clumsy, clotted and fatuously indulgent. utterly tasteless. nothing to see for science or for art.

it's pretty, but it needs some smurfs in it ... maybe some smurfs having a picnic.

Hipparcos is the preferred spelling for the satellite and catalog.

it's a nice picture, but it needs a couple of smirfs roasting marshmallows around a campfire.

very nice. the original paper has added scales for small z and recent lookback times.
i hope ned wright soon updates his cosmological calculator, which i've found very useful ...

http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/CosmoCalc.html

the "ring" structure, known as a circumnuclear ring, seems to occur in about 20% of spiral galaxies (in a small sample) and is associated with an active galactic nucleus. computer simulations suggest that the rings would result from the near collision of two galactic nuclei; the ring is co...

today's APOD reflects the common and peculiar neglect of double stars and their importance in stellar evolution. at the center of this star forming region is a visual double star, catalogued by william herschel as H N 40, which comprises seven components in the Washington Double Star catalog. the tw...

i'm interested to see how the new population distributions affect the drake equation (or its equivalent). i haven't yet seen data published in a useable format; the probability of life evolving on earth mass planets depends on many factors, including the parent star spectral type, the mass limits fo...

as background, i think the current guesstimate of maximum stellar mass is about 150 solar masses.

so fix the server already. or announce your new permanent URL.

what is the longest period that APOD has gone without publishing a photograph of "star trails plus picturesque landscape elements"? currently: 69 days. or, if you prefer chateau star trails to polar star trails, 74 days. as the APOD reader says, "I have seen so many pictures of star ...

my first reaction was ... wow, those are damn fine optics. the internal reflections indicate highly sophisticated lens coatings. second reaction was ... this is the classic armslength cellphone self portrait photo format used for about 70% of college freshman facebook avatars. a real mashup of style...

i know this place! it's in west texas!

it would be great to see a pullback montage of mars orbiter photographs, from ground texture to hemisphere view, that shows the location of the landing site and places it in the context of named features visible from earth and the distance of the survey site from the polar cap.

what is the longest period that APOD has gone without publishing a photograph of "star trails plus picturesque landscape elements"?

i'd encourage the editors to try to beat that record.

a sphere 1400 kilometers in diameter of water. ok ... now let's calculate how much trash, garbage, polluted runoff and sewage is dumped into it each year by 7 billion humans. maybe you can tint it brown in proportion. blue is much too optimistic.

or, we could have a photo of the conjunction over a flower show, or over the superbowl, or reflected in the mirror of the london four seasons hotel. that "technically" would qualify as an APOD valid image ... true ... and yet ...

i agree the explanation is correct but confusing ... and the link from "straight lines" to "light cones" even moreso. the illusion of converging rays applies specifically to the perspective projection of parallel lines onto a plane perpendicular to the line of sight. the spherica...

this is a very familiar effect to landscape painters (such as myself). in transparent watercolors and glazed oil paints, it raises the tricky problem of painting the transition from blue sky to yellow horizon without introducing any obvious green ... which in paints is produced by mixing yellow and ...

it's worth mention that if the earth's diameter in relation to the span of the north american continent really were that small, it's probable that the earth's atmosphere would have long ago escaped and we'd be living on something resembling arid mars. oh wait, we wouldn't be living at all, because e...

"Resolved" is sometimes used to describe individual stars seen in other galaxies. In this case, it doesn't mean a star is spatially resolved, but that an individual star is detectable. ann's usage was clear enough to me. what is the "correct" term for a star that is photographic...

i appreciated the link to the "starburst" paper on ADS, quite a nice example of galaxy dissection and analysis. it is striking to note the number of raggedy ("young") and OB rich galaxies in the sculptor group, which seems to be a new galactic suburb under construction. by compar...

i'd say this is actually "the wimpy galaxy" because it seems already to have eaten several hamburger galaxies and hasn't quite digested them all yet. perhaps it's even feeling a little indigestion. (proving the rule, you pay for today what you ate yesterday.) i don't quite get ann's commen...