Starship Asterisk*

This type of triangular structure, drawn several times next to a circle, is exactly how I would draw the sun as a child, along with fellow untold millions of children drawing the sun like this! We were right all along haha!

Another fun game of "what's that star!" The tiny, slowly moving star is definitely a satellite, the time of night here is closer to sunrise than sunset, and they are looking east, into the part of space already lit up with sunlight, a great time to see satellites and tumbling rocket bodies...

So, can I assume that the trail of the Electron rocket was made by a separate set of exposures? It can't just be there over the 2.5 hours of the 50 exposures to make the star trails, can it? Yes, it probably is. I mean, it could be done either way. But practically, with wide launch windows, the exa...

I always appreciate your posts Ann, and I also love playing "what's that star"! We can figure it out with some free planetarium software like Stellarium and the launch location and time. Looking at Rocketlab's press release, we also get an idea why maybe this photographer was taking a two ...

Western USA will get a similar view just before sunrise on September 17th, and Saturn's opposition is September 8th, so even as dim as the light from Saturn can appear next to the moon, this will be about as bright as it gets. All the Hawaii observatories should have a nice view, I hope somebody doe...

Take the comparison of 3 million light years to 3 ten-thousandths of a light second - what is that for? (The latter number works out to 5.6 miles and so is probably wrong, too many decImal places, as that meteor track is most likely starting at least 50 miles up) By my calculations 0.0003 light sec...

What a spectacular shot! I love thinking about how the light from the galaxy is relatively constant, from an amateur instrument, M33 is always going to look the same, every night, for the rest of our lives and a long time into the future. But that meteor barely lasted a second, and you'll never see ...

If you love clouds and you love astronomy then no matter what condition the sky, you'll enjoy a look up after sunset! But I also love nitpicking... today's APOD says that iridescent clouds are "relatively rare" but they are actually very common. If there are no clouds, you can't see irides...

It would have helped to label this image, as I can't tell from the text exactly what I'm looking at—confusing at best. I really like when APOD does "mouse-over" annotated images, that's a good compromise between clarity and the beautiful view without text labels. Haha, and I know you mean...

Beautiful! So we only get to see Titan's shadow on Saturn about once every 15 years, right? I was looking up in Stellarium and it looks like there will be several visible passes around this time next year.

The image is striking (pun intended). The number of Jets is a good question. It appears that there are 5 with 2 converging and one (on the right) diverging. But, I am wondering what is the bright object in the middle of the frame? to answer that we need to recognize the star field. Is there a star ...

Maybe I'm wrong, but that "jet" of material looks exactly like a low Reynolds number smoke simulation. I happen to have more than a decade of painful experience with numerical simulations of turbulence. The rule of thumb for analysis via Reynolds number is that you measure the characterist...

"a multitude of planet-dwarfing active regions"

Since dwarf planets are dwarfed by planets, by the transitive property, these planet-dwarfing regions must be dwarf-planet-dwarfing!

Another one: If it's blinking but appears too high to be an aircraft, or even more mystifying, if the blinking is irregular! - it's a tumbling satellite. Yep, and slow but steady brightness changes would likely be the giant tumbling rocket body stage left in orbit after releasing a satellite, I saw...

I was thinking what Ann has labeled object 8 is a dusty galaxy, and I thought I saw several dusty looking galaxies while zoomed into this image... but this is NIRCam, and when it takes pictures around the local milky way, it makes dust look transparent. So is this light really so distant that it use...

In a nearby alternate universe, this image shows the Olympic torch being lit at the top of the Eiffel Tower by orbital laser! Haha, I wonder what they will actually do, the 2024 summer games in Paris are just a month or two away.

If one is going to map grayscale to a color scale, why limit ourselves to just purple or orange, when we could have both? The perceptually uniform colormap "plasma" or "inferno" freely available from matplotlib might look really good, and they seem appropriately named.

"When's your birthday?"
"April 11th"
"What year?"
"Every year!"

Haha I agree it might be a little too close up. I used to do Jupiter sketching when I had access to an 8" refractor, always in black and white though, never attempted color. Sketching really adds to the observing experience, I think. Remember that blue storm that blew up briefly on Saturn? I th...

Imagine if it started ticking down: "Astronomers report giant 37 in the sky is now a 36 - wait - this just in, it's 35!" Haha, feels like something that could've been in Clarke's "Nine Billion Names of God"

You missed the "Of these" reference at the start of the sentence. I think the writer was just trying to point out that the comets and Mercury were not visible to the unaided eye. But yes, Jupiter was bright! It must be just out of frame in this image.

I saw this eclipse and the bright pink prominences were stunning, and it got me reading about H alpha emission. And after some reading, I feel betrayed by every "H alpha" filtered photo of the sun I have seen. Because the prominences appeared obviously PINK to human eyes, doesn't that mean...

I was also near Indianapolis, the thin cirrus blanketing the entire multi-state area made comet viewing likelihood near zero. The comet's position was about at 10 o'clock with respect to the sun from that location. Venus was bright, Jupiter was visible, and the prominences and corona were still stun...

I've always loved this image, but I feel compelled to make a "well, actually" comment, please forgive me, but I don't think the word "coincidence" is appropriate and instead one could conceivably substitute "inevitable" because of the caveat that we have a Full Moon, no...

A key phrase here is "aerosol susceptibility" because broadly speaking, there is a large contrast from land to ocean for the amount of particulate matter floating in the air - aka the aerosol concentration is much higher over land than over the ocean. So running your SUV does not cause thi...