Starship Asterisk*

Comet 67P is the scariest place i have ever seen. Gives me the creeps every-time i see it. You can't tell up from down and it looks like you would fall off if you took 2 steps.

Yes this image is great but doesn't show enough of the dark side. Anybody seen the Netflix film "Aliens on the Moon"? It shows quite a bit and raises the question of an extended family of man on the dark side. Most of it is provocative at best but raises the question that we might have fri...

A snowstorm of carbon dioxide flakes.

Well the color and density of blooms pretty well matches my Lucille Ball, petals though make this flower an aster.

The date on apod page needs correction from Feb 8 to Feb 12

The layering is obvious and the thickness of the layers is pretty uniform suggesting many years of an annual cycle. The cross-bedding though is pretty weak so this particular lake bed doesn't appear to have been changing all that much. The layering itself consists of fairly thin layers suggesting hu...

This is an interesting apod with a handsome set of notes among the underlined words. When you go to the link at Supernova Remnant IC 443 it is the apod of June 2, 2006. The image for that apod shows a trail IC 443 produces in radio, x-ray & visible lights. So we see a star trail from which we ca...

This apod title is dated Dec 3 in the archive BUT is dated Dec 2 onscreen.!!

Some of the links at the end of the commentary indicate that the displayed form is the circumstellar disk of the star. So the nebulosity is mostly molecular hydrogen in that disk. Normally that would mean planets, other companion stars...? Right?

Landing on the object is one thing but drilling into the surface seems foolhardy. The object is obviously in a tenuous state and anything can disturb and change its behavior. The smooth spots are likely dusts or condensates and landing there will remove the material. This would interfere with analys...

Interesting how much of life is serendipity...this Shuttle shot shows the structure of the atmosphere better than any other image i've seen.

So this is a nice looking image of a time where-in more dark energy must have been available for future growth. And here we are wondering how much more growth is available. Nice image...it even looks like its an earlier time somehow.

I was born in Newberry, MI after 1939 but not much after; my mother had a picture pretty much identical and she thought the storm was actually pretty nice. Her picture showed a tunnel to get into the house and the streets were the only way to get around. Photography in those days was when you mailed...

Chris wrote:"A quick, back-of-the-envelope analysis."

Now there is a handsome nuts and bolts of the situation.

"Geckzilla wrote: This seems wildly unsafe... not unlike walking out during a hail storm or a tornado." Well walking around would be unsafe and the bigger the stone the more unsafe. Bring a milk pail on a stick and stick that out there. A robot-ish thing might do as well but a pail on a st...

There was some discussion recently about getting rich by collecting olivine crystals from a stellar nebula but this Neptune story tops that source of Wealth. Open the link at "Neptune's blue cloud tops" and go to that older APOD page. On that page of 22 September, 2002 open the link at &qu...

Monseigneur Georges Lemaître as a baby contemplating where he cam from ?? - Childs World - Bubbles.jpg Lemaitre image reminds me that it you exhale slowly when making your bubbles they accumulate the warm air from your lungs. Then when the bubble releases it goes up instead of down! When New Dawn di...

This display would be what is called an 'instructable' and serve very nicely in a lecture on the light our planet evolved with. It very nicely shows the incredible brevity of our light sensing ability and should be taught by an owl or an eagle whose light sensing abilities exceed primate skills.

Geckzilla quetions calling them jets: "is it really appropriate to call them jets?" Vapor trails might do as well since they lines of faint stars presumably formed eons ago from tidal tails of small galaxies which interacted with NGC 1097. These jets though are pretty hard to see in the co...

Hey, in any case this is a neat picture of this comet P5 though the picture of A2 in 2010 apod is neater still. The idea that the comet is rotating refers to P5 and a colliding comet for A2 does reveal a sense that two kinds of things have happened to a comet. So we are talking about comets, right?

Astronomer's are Platonist's so they have lots of ideas. Socrates had a whole Parable on a Cave. Unfortunately when you went in all the ideas you ran into were bright and shiny.

Images like this are really beyond words. We live in a place whose dimensions can't be comprehended.

Alter-ego wrote I'm curious about your observation. For the date and times you mentioned from Muskegon, M101 was at lower culmination (due north, about 8° altitude), what optical aid were you using? On that date the handle of the Big Dipper was essentially parallel to the horizon, about 10 degrees a...

Neufer wrote "you saw a 10th magnitude star" referring to my post earlier. Yes, i saw SN2011fe whose mag was between 9 & 10 on Sept 10, 2011, indeed according to a AAVSO special report many visual observations confirmed seeing the event. By that time in Sept the SN was near max and i h...

Neufer wondered about seeing the supernova SN2011fe...which he cites as a magnitude 10. Well yes i did see it and according to a report by the AAVSO