Starship Asterisk*

Nice apod which refers to naked eye astronomy and mentions limits of vision to M31. If you have ever seen it you know it is quite an extended object even though it can only be seen by not looking directly at it. There are two pointer stars in the asterism that you can stare at and the ruddy red glow...

This is an interesting pair of galaxies but the numbers used to characterize them is a problem. This apod, Mr Snyder and the Hubble link say that this pair of galaxies are approx. 400 million lt yrs away and that the two galaxies are approx 400 thousand lt yrs apart. Now i exaggerate a bit, the dist...

Being a Nivukoskinen myself its always nice to see mention of Suomi NPP is still doing something in this world of ours.

Nice Antenna image showing the tumult and the text reminding us that we too will become tumultuous. That is the kind of thing we humans thrive in, under and around; despite the terrible injustice of it all. That is one of the benefits of living in a universe which may drag on for a 100 trillion year...

From the shores of Lake Michigan with binoculars Venus is especially striking because the crescent Moon and crescent Venus seem to compliment each other.

Really a beautifully done APOD with all the tools being used to examine her atmosphere on display as well. Where the hell is Matt is pretty good too, with lots of evidence in it about the various cultures and places in this world. But just maybe this APOD is better, even though my son's name is Matt.

The opening sentence of this apod is interesting.: "The most distant object easily visible to the eye is M31, the great Andromeda Galaxy some two and a half million light-years away. But without a telescope, even this immense spiral galaxy - spanning over 200,000 light years - appears as a fain...

Given this image of the galaxy NGC 1672 the central bar isn't visible, instead we see a hand. No arms, only fingers. The fingers are overlapping such as we might see as a hand is being opened. The link at "Hubble Space Telescope" indicates why.

Ann seems to think i am talking about blue stars, not so. NGC5963 is a low luminosity GALAXY. There other things that are blue besides stars. These types of galaxies have low densities of gas and thus form stars slowly. Are classes of blue stars in this galaxy? I have no idea, it the galaxy that is ...

Assuming the two galaxies NGCs 5963 & 5963 are approximately the same size in the image that would make the diam. of 5963 about 50,000 lt. years . The reference paper by S´anchez-Salcedo suggesting that a model of this Low surface brightness galaxy has a gas density which results in not so brigh...

I see strings of stars throughout the cluster. Has anyone ever commented on this or am I just having a post-60's flashback ? I agree that images of clusters and Einstein Cross types of images often contain strings of stars in short segments that have been mentioned above. Indeed, almost all the con...

A subterranean ocean and icy crust must be giving Jules Verne travel plan dreams.

This image isn't simply striking, its amazing. Stare at it and it becomes three dimensional

The star trails seen in the ESO mirror also appear to contain auroral rings perhaps? The ring is more or less complete and seems to show the southern horizon which is a dark circle. I believe it was quite likely aurora on Jan 24 did occur.

The Earth also experiences Jet outflows along the Polar Front but they vary in number from 4-6. Six though is much neater since Circumference = 2 pi R and is approximately 6 which means for any circle you can fit its radius onto its circumference approx. six times. Thus in the spring as the polar fr...

The image is neat as are those similar ones posted in the past. This one though gives you a good idea about the weather at that location over the year. Each township could almost generate their own image to give the public an idea of how nice the weather has or hasn't been over the year.

There is a collection of satellites whose orbital characteristics roughly match those of the Earth relative to the sun. These objects while typically quite small are regularly captured as they pass through L1 and can thus insert themselves into orbit about the Earth and hence at least temporarily or...

Twelve minute exposure yet the mountainside is poorly visible tells you a lot about the foggy air. Nearby hillside is the only part of the image that tells you the camera was working properly.

In addition to the distance problem the concluding sentence: It presents compelling evidence that detailed features of galaxy mergers observed with small, wide field telescopes on planet Earth, are natural consequences of galaxy formation and fundamental properties of dark matter. It refers to the m...

So that's how Eratosthenes got the size of the Earth, huh. Neat.

If 22b is a water world this would perhaps be one of the best type of worlds to visit. Splashdown would be literal and if gravity were a too great your sinking could be salvation. As you sink the formation of a swim bladder could allow you to reach neutral buoyancy pretty quickly. Indeed having a ch...

Anybody know?... Well talking to my shadow; but, assuming the material is stressed then this color distribution looks like stress birefringence because it occurs along the edge of the sample. When i let my fingers do the walking then Wiki came along with the talking and filled me in. This assumes th...

Nice pictures of rocks from Vesta. The rock on the right though bothers me since some of the crystalline structure is poly-chromatic. Its been a couple decades since doing similar samples and don't remember why that occurs. The light source is polarized so the sample maybe isn't perfectly flat along...

This bit of news was on the Cosmic Mirror a week ago or so and is in the realm of Cosmology of the sort that will interest Penrose and the cyclic cosmologists. Stars in the young universe producing clouds of heavy metals which simple big bang cosmology assumes couldn't have been produced. Zounds. A ...

The Hyades is not well shown in the photo, in fact the Pleiades is usually said to be on the back of the bull and this is not at all what one might guess with the image. Someone else might mumble about this to clarify but other than Aldebaran there is something unsaid in this APOD