Starship Asterisk*

Gotta be space monkeys! We're just beginning to explore the phenomena at the top of a lightning bolt. Who knew gamma rays would shoot up and travel along the Earth's magnetic field lines (whistlers), or its interaction with the ionosphere. When I was a child, nobody knew about Schumann Resonance bet...

I can see the upper-left tidal tail in the enlarged image. Is that small bit of fuzz just below the centre of the galaxy a remnant of the same tidal tail?

Thank you for your explanation. I forgot that debris along the comet's path would orbit the sun at the same velocity as the comet. I need to read that book on celestial mechanics again. The same sort of "forgetting the basics" as that dumb grandfather paradox of time travel. Whatever you d...

News of tomorrow's meteor shower reminded me to ask: Does comet debris orbit the Sun following the host comet? The dust can't be stationary because we'd pretty-much clear a path after a few years. Every year we pass through the comet trail, e.g., Halley's Comet, we get a shower, with a meteor freque...

Thank you for your explanation. Still trying to get my brain around the concept. I recently got halfway through Dr. Miller's explanation of virtual photons, which is where I found that bit about particles that seem to appear out of nowhere then self-annihilate: http://www.vega.org.uk/video/programme...

We've all seen the analogy with bits of paper or dots stuck to a balloon that get farther apart as the balloon expands. However, that's not the way the universe expands. The fabric of spacetime isn't stretched; new spacetime shows up to push the existing spacetime apart, if my feeble understanding o...

What is that greenish-blue smudge in the upper center of this amazing image, a dwarf galaxy? http://www.noao.edu/outreach/aop/observers/n4565hugo.jpg As always, I start my day by staggering my imagination with APODs and their links. Sew! it takes a hundred thousand years for a photon emitted at one ...

The STEREO views are so cool! You can see the object flying above the surface of the sun before vanishing near the center of image. Whatever it was, comet or asteroid, it had to have vaporized high above the surface. I'll go out on a limb here, I think it is impossible for the object to have caused ...

I am not a smartphone owner, nor do I play one on TV. QR code is patented. You have to pay the folks over at ISO to get a copy of the standard. Malicious codes can be superimposed over malign codes, a security risk leaving the door open for all sorts of naughty people to get inside your phone. That ...

"Visible cities, countries and landmarks include (in order) Vancouver Island, Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Fransisco, Los Angeles. Phoenix. Multiple cities in Texas, New Mexico and Mexico. Mexico City, the Gulf of Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula, Lightning in the Pacific Ocean, Gua...

As I write this (0:55 UTC), the ISS is flying a similar path, from the North Pacific just south of Alaska, Pacific Coast just north of Washington, then across the US to South Carolina, across the Caribbean, crossing northern Brasil to the Atlantic. Since the orbital inclination is 51.6413 degrees, i...

Excweeze me? Did you say one hundred fifty kilometers per second?! Isn't that over a quarter million miles per hour? 335,540mph?! Less than an hour to get to the Moon? Doesn't it take a rip-snorting electric and/or magnetic field to shape plasma into jets? Sew! is the source somewhere in that cloud ...

Where can I purchase cross-eye glasses? I thought the surface was pretty-much all the same elevation. 3D revealed the top part with the dense population of small round rocks and the right edge as the probable surface, with a deep gouge in the middle, particularly across the central canyon-like featu...

n8zrj » Wed Aug 03, 2011 7:44 am Does anyone know what the interloper is to the left of the lower right galaxy (M66)? There is a small red streak followed by a purple streak. Thanks, Ann! Very much closer to home, this image also contains the tracks of several asteroids within the Solar System that...

Will Dawn be able to analyze the composition of Vesta's surface? Pretty-much all of the meteorites we have found are composed of nickel and iron, but that's after the outer bits burn off in the upper atmosphere. I wonder Vesta's surface is similar to the Moon samples that our Heroes brought back. [A...

End of an era. *sniff*
From Project Mercury (when a First Class Postage stamp cost four cents) with Sam the Rhesus macaque, Project Gemini, Project Apollo with men on the moon, to Atlantis STS-135 the final Space Shuttle flight, at least the ISS remains. So, too, the footprints on the Moon.

"Oh My God -- It's Full of Stars!"
-- David Bowman, Astronaut, _2001: A Space Odyssey_ , Arthur C. Clarke.

Stare at that image long enough, it's guaranteed to cure excessive dignity.
--
Obquote: "...billions and billions..." -Dr. Carl Sagan.

I'm intrigued by the dust patterns at the center of the galaxy. Looking head on, those dust lanes would be above the object at the center. Imagining a 3D image, the two lanes on the top of the central globe appear to originate at the top of the sphere and spiral down away from the center. Either tha...

"...Carina Nebula is one of our galaxy's largest star-forming regions" How can we know what exists in our galaxy on the other side of the nucleus? My question does not detract from the above statement, which implies there may be many more of our galaxy's largest star-forming regions. Dr. W...