Starship Asterisk*

Here is an admittedly crazy thought. Please tell me why it cannot be so. Suppose that early in its history, Mars cooled faster than Earth because it's smaller. Somehow it had a grazing collision with Earth, which, being more molten, threw off material that became Earth's moon. Mars threw off its su...

Although your point about scientific accuracy in general is well taken, I don't think that's at issue here. Scientifically, this mosaic doesn't provide much- that comes from the individual images that make it up. I think there's a simpler answer: it's a heck of a lot of work to make a seamless mosa...

So, when I apply my Photoshop program to a whole bunch of samples for a panorama, I typically get a cleaner looking picture. How come this one is so tatty? I'm surprised nobody has answered this question yet. I think it is quite a good one. I believe the answer is that NASA is more concerned about ...

I think if I saw a meteorite land, I would think "when am I ever going to be able to be potentially burnt/frozen by an object from outer space again"? And then I would touch the darn thing and expand my knowledge.

jrjanzen wrote:Obviously concocted. The shadows in the picture are in a direction NEVER achieved by any of the solar positions on the analemma!

Question: How could you believe that a photo with 36 suns in it could NOT be "obviously concocted"?

Any ideas why they might be there? Those look like "hot pixels", or "stuck pixels". I see the exact same pattern sometimes on my digital camera. After a while the sensor starts to degrade, and some photosensor sites get stuck in the "on" position. I'm not exactly sure ...

there are billions and billions of galaxies and each has billions and billions of stars! Naming them all would be quite a feat! :) other galaxies do have names though; like the Whirlpool and the Sombrero for example. Quite easy, actually... just name them all George . Personally I don't mind the nu...

Based on the length of the star trails (about 45 degrees), it looks like it was a 3 hour exposure. With digital cameras, quite often you can take multiple shorter exposures and "stack" them, but I never could figure out how you could stack star trail images without getting gaps in the trai...

aperture is the diameter of the Lens/Mirror & could not be referred as f/x i guess. the one you mentioned (f/8) is focal ratio (aperture/focal length). which i've heard the term "Diaphragm" (=a device for varying the effective aperture of the in a camera or other optical system) inste...

is "chromatic aberration" a problem is such a short focal length (Cameras)? Chromatic aberration tends to be more pronounced on short focal length (wide angle) lenses, due to the fact that it is difficult to make a lens that can accept light from a wide set of angles without perfectly cou...

It would be very informative to post side-by-side images of this scene - one taken at visible wavelengths and the other at IR wavelengths - to visually demonstrate the ability of IR images to penetrate cosmic dust. You can look at this APOD: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap061003.html I loaded the two ...