Starship Asterisk*

That's a beautiful image, Miguel. Thank you! Please note "the Lady in the Moon". Her face covers much of the full Moon. We see her in profile, looking left. Her face is light-colored, but her profile is outlined as if with a dark pen of some sort. Her hair is also dark. http://www.netaxs.c...

The M13 globular and airplane trail is a lot of serendipitous fun. I, of course, note that the "white lights" of the airplane are redder than the overall color of the globular. My second favorite of the pictures here must be the Yosemite image. The stark beauty of that image is almost othe...

Case wrote: Pioneer 11 is now estimated to be following an escape trajectory from the solar system. Pioneer 11 will pass near the star Lambda (λ) Aquilae in about 4 million years time. Wow, Pioneer 11 will sail past Lambda Aquilae! I'm impressed. Lambda Aquilae is a B9V type star, about twice as hot...

Chris wrote: It may contain hydrogen in other states of ionization, or neutral. Those would not show up as red in this image. Yes, there are other states of ionization for hydrogen than hydrogen alpha. There is hydrogen beta, for example, a higher state of ionization, which produces a blue-green lig...

A very interesting post, Bystander. Personally I'm highly skeptical of attempts to "antropomorphize" the universe, or to prove that other planetary bodies are so much like the Earth (even though they obviously aren't like the Earth) that they must be like the Earth in such a way that they ...

It might be interesting to compare Thor's Helmet, a "pre-explosion" nebula, with the Crab Nebula, a "post-explosion" nebula. In the Crab, any bubble surrounding the massive star has been blown to smithereens, but it is possible that magnetism within the nebula is keeping the fila...

To make sense of the image, I must try to make sense of its colors, as usual. The color balance seems slightly shifted to the red, apart from the fact that the blue color of the helmet is so obvious. But some of the stars look very orange, while none of the stars look strikingly blue. Nevertheless, ...

Since I always insist that the Sun is white, I probably shouldn't like the Sun picture. But I do. There is a wonderful sense of unreality about it. Or maybe this is what the Sun's "avatar" would look like if it was born again as a non-luminous entity in another reality. Here the Sun looks ...

BMAONE23 said: When I look at this image, It appears to me that the Reddish tentacles are traversing along the back side of the galaxy and that the purple-blue tentacles are wrapping around the front. Could they be caused by interaction between magnetic fields and the dark matter halo? I'll offer no...

Thanks, BMAONE23! I'll try to remember it. The distance in kilometer to Alpha Centauri is approximately 400 followed by twelve zeros!

Ann

Perseus A,NGC 1275, is like a version of NGC 5128, also known as Centaurus A. In both cases we are talking about a hapless spiral galaxy falling straight into colossal elliptical galaxy and setting off all kinds of stellar fireworks. http://www.laughtergenealogy.com/bin/space/centaurus-a2.jpg Centau...

Nice! NGC 1275 is a favorite galaxy of mine. Do you realize that those tentacles of gas and stars extending from this galaxy make it ever so slightly like a galaxy-size version of the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic cloud?



Ann

As a true-color astronomy nerd, I find it a bit depressing that almost all major new astronomy projects seem to deal with infrared astronomy, which can only ever produce false-color images. Of course I, too, realize that infrared astronomy is incredibly important, because infrared telescopes can see...

One more thing about the color of M13. I'm not asking anyone to share my sense of aesthetics, but do you realize that M13 has the same overall color as the Sun? Its integrated color index is 0.67, almost exactly the same as the Sun's. And if the Sun is white, as I insist it is, then it is no wonder ...

Well, we know that there are a lot of supernova remnants near the center of the Milky Way. There are also two very massive clusters there, the Quintuplet and Arches clusters. And if M 82 can blow twin bubbles this size from supernovae alone, is it so surprising that our own galaxy can produce enough...

Speaking of the mass of the Earth, I have managed to learn that the mass of the Sun is about 300,000 times the mass of the Earth, but I have never managed to learn a number for the mass of the Earth. How much is it in metric tons? Speaking of large numbers, I can't seem to learn the distance to Apha...

Hmmm, sorry. I think I replied to the wrong challenge.

The picture for Jun 03 is, just maybe, an image of a large starforming nebula in Cassiopeia, and it is probably a Spitzer image.

Ann

Astrolabe, I've been thinking a bit more about what you said. It could be that you are absolutely right about what you said about volume and density, or at least that you and I mean the same thing! :mrgreen: And Chris, thank you for your answer. Yes, you are right of course: Assuming there is no fri...

Wow! Ophiuchus and Scorpius are turning into a veritable zoo, and it's not only snakes and scorpions that haunt these constellations! First it was Rogelio Bernal Andreo who showed us the amazing blue horse in this part of the sky, and now John A. Davis has found the most fantastic camel there! Where...

Thank you for your answers, astrolabe and makc. Astrolabe wrote: Since mass is a function of density vs. volume This doesn't sound right to me. I thought that mass is mass, regardless of the volume containing this mass. When I was a kid, we used to asked each other this question: Which is heaviest, ...

60moo wrote: Something relevant to this topic that has always eluded me: When an object is accelerated towards the speed of light, how much of the applied energy goes into the increase in velocity of that object, and how much goes into increasing the object's mass? All of it, and all of it. They're...

Hey, Rob, congrats on your globular cluster infatuation! We all need our space favorites. And even I realize that globular clusters are amazing things. I even realize that they contain colored stars. They are just not my thing, but they are your thing, and they are a lot of other people's thing, too...

Yet the whole universe is connected in a form of space time grid. What does that mean? Most of the Universe is not connected to the rest. Ah, Chris. The danger of illustrations. I've just tried to convince you that the Sun ins't yellow. Stubbornly, you have refused to acknowledge that I'm right. Ye...

I chose Rho Ophiuchi. Rogelio Bernal Andreo is a favorite of mine whose delightfully colorful crisp clear wide angle images have been made Astronomy Picture of the Day several times. Deservedly so, if you ask me. The Mars image is interesting. The tracks of a man-made machine are imprinted on the st...

It's nice to see Rob Gendler's version of the Hubble image of NGC 2207 and IC 2163, because he has a much better eye for color than the guys at Hubble. And Gendler is generally a master at processing astro-images. The galaxy pair is interesting. NGC 2207 looks like a loose collection of bright patch...