Starship Asterisk*

Well this is an interesting image certainly in light of the observation i make in watching national news networks mentioning these events fairly often this year. But more than that the image is great; the discussion presented in the text is superb. Direct, clear and well said; easy to follow and wit...

Zounds...the image downloaded is about 42 megabytes. After trying to download it several time Irfanview seemed to be able to digest it.

The Vargas image of M42 posted September 13 last is another beauty of all hallows eve I've had on my desktop since that time. It is the face of a witch with wispy gray hair and a warty nose. Her eyes and mouth covered by a three fingered hand asking us to be quiet as she sneaks up on our Earthly Lair.

And so suppose there is a Heaven.
Might it be here in Cepheus?

The apparent flow may be the underlying structure or mountain that is expanding. The waterfall itself being disconnected is merely stretching. While the image is striking, the mountain itself is clearly actively involved in stellar evolution and is convoluted in a manner that gives the waterfall its...

Big Bang Cosmology...the kind from several decades ago has been replaced; or rather is being developed on a quantum level by professional astronomers. Not by groupies found in so many internet Cafes. These three astronomers wrote a beautiful article on a model for space. Space itself, that quantum v...

Buying a telescope should be preceded by the understanding of what will be seen once you commit to a purchase. Stars are points of light and only points of light. A telescope allows you to see many more of them and that is all. The only star that isn't a point of light is the sun and generally never...

Boy that is a jim dandy rocket...need Frank Sinatra to fly me to the moon.

Pacman's eyeball is nicely defined in this image and his tongue is almost metaphorical.

The APOD indicates the space station is NW of Beijing by 400 km? Doesn't it look like the viewpoint of the camera is SW of the city; the sun is rising in the NE and the meteor is heading south while the bright collection of lights on the ground is north of the camera. Neat image though and the bulge...

Looks like a couple of crushed beer cans in center of image.

I'm no expert on the ISS but the image appears to point out that the station has xyz axes. Indeed it appears that the station has a mechanism to absorb the slow motion impact of docking spacecraft. Having taught junk like that it i would judge that the ship impact was counter-balanced by one of thos...

Nice job APOD and thank you Soyuz.

Is this an apod about Crab or Geminga? Geminga is more interesting since is 8 times closer to us than the Crab. Since the background changes more than Geminga does. Could Inflation of the Big Bang still be going on? Surely, i don't know but Steinhardt's article raises interesting questions about jus...

A nice image with as much detail as you would be able to handle can be collected and then using Irfanview.exe the image can be enlarged as much as you might want and labels added to remind yourself why the image was produced.

My initial glance at this image gave me the impression it was about Ireland somehow.

Was raised on the shores of Western Michigan and walk the beach of Lake Michigan in the early morning hours. See the same rhythm in the waves on quiet mornings though those waves don't splash as much as the ones in the video. Interesting that waves in water and clouds have almost the same unrelentin...

Looks like 9.5 cycles of the compound swing, the half cycle because the two ends of the patterns are on opposite sides of the figure. Guess i was hoping the width and height of the figure might have some significance but the width is the camera body contribution to motion and the height of the figur...

Startling film with careful alignment of image with sound track. Play the video at church and ask whether it inspires an understanding of how small we are relative to the universe. Yes we have some skills in naming things and then analyzing how they work but the stark extent of what we see & ima...

Seems like size is the theme so sticking to theme should have shown a star or two smaller than the sun since the sun has a respectable size and is relatively large on a count basis along the main sequence.

Life on Earth is going to disappear in the future, that is a concrete fact. A discussion about when it appeared seems rather trite and it has disappeared from the scientific publications i am familiar with at least 20 years ago. If this were 1930 and Tombaugh were around we would be reading such thi...

There are several images, many provided by APOD as well, which contain NGC 2170 but this particular is the most striking. Yet the image is small pixel-wise and the ~700 kB image isn't as nicely presented until it is reduced to 160 kB seen on the APOD and Blocks linked page. The black to brown areas ...