Starship Asterisk*

What other cultural significance does the Harvest Moon hold in different tunnel rush regions around the world? Google is useful here. Various articles found, but here's a more informative one (assuming it's accurate!): https://www.outdoorapothecary.com/septembers-full-moon/ THE FOLKLORE OF Septembe...

Rauf wrote: ↑Thu Sep 19, 2024 3:48 pm This should be called the Japan Nebula!

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Perfect - nice!

Chris Peterson wrote: ↑Wed Sep 18, 2024 2:28 pm The Man in the Moon got a bit of a haircut last night!
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And why was that? [ EDIT: never mind - I see there was a partial lunar eclipse last night. I don't keep up with daily astronomy sky watching news, I'm afraid. ]

Hmmm https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53999883294_1ea7eb7b1f_b.jpg https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/gltf_embed/2369/ ... What are you showing here? it almost looks like you reflected around the vertical midline, but not quite. Is this what the actual surface looks like (minus the blurry section in t...

Two different hits in approximately the same place? Hmmm https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53999883294_1ea7eb7b1f_b.jpg https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/gltf_embed/2369/ ... What are you showing here? it almost looks like you reflected around the vertical midline, but not quite. Is this what the actu...

I don't on my Android phone. Just a context menu. Which is what I'd expect unless some very specific coding on the website isn't done. Odd. It only works if you long press on the image on the page with the text. Not if you click the image first, which makes sense. I see the same behavior with both ...

I'm not sure if that works on touchscreen devices. Hover operations generally don't unless very deliberate and careful workarounds are provided. On my iPad anyway, if I long press the image, the hover-over image shows up. Ditto for my Android phone. I don't on my Android phone. Just a context menu....

Ooop! Sorry, I failed to see that this is a "roll-on-roll off" (RORO) image showing different images depending on whether the cursor is on the image or not. Will all viewers have access to the RORO feature? I'm not sure if that works on touchscreen devices. Hover operations generally don'...

The image does not look like the Mona Lisa to me. It is more like the head in the Madonna of the Yarnwinder (Spindles), the Buccleuch version! Nice. I had to google that. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madonna_of_the_Yarnwinder The Madonna of the Yarnwinder (Italian: Madonna dei Fusi, "Mad...

The auroral glow is caused by emission from excited oxygen atoms in the extremely rarefied upper atmosphere still present at the level of the orbiting outpost. So, the ISS is actually embedded within the aurora I suppose, in addition to being able to see it while looking through a long enough colum...

On the lower right, is this a planetary disk seen edge-on ? It is clearly a disk of some sort. APOD 12 September 2024 detail.png I'd say it's the the accretion disk, or the remnant of the accretion disk, around a young star. No obvious signs of planet formation can be seen at this resolution and ma...

So "Pavonis Mons" is the bump on Mars' limb? See:


And a close-up:

Both Martian moons were discovered in 1877 by Asaph Hall , an American astronomer working at the US Naval Observatory in Washington D.C. But their existence was postulated around 1610 by Johannes Kepler , the astronomer who derived the laws of planetary motion. In this case, Kepler's prediction was...

Thanks, guys (AVAO, Chris and Ann).

So, Neptune's atmospheric methane both absorbs infrared (getting warmer I suppose), and then also emits infrared that is visible to JWST here? Or is it only the "High altitude clouds that reach above most of Neptune's absorbing methane" that we are seeing here? (And that also must be emitt...

As for the Nebra Sky Disk, sadly, the ridged circular arc at the bottom is apparently not the mirror from a long lost reflecting telescope, but the "solar boat" of the Sun deity! The Sun was sometimes envisioned as traveling through the sky in a boat. A prominent example is the solar barqu...

Except in this case it's three quarters of the way through a full cycle. It's a waning moon. Well, it marks one of the four natural quarter positions around the circle of moon phases. But I phrased it badly in my first post. I think that calling this a "quarter moon", as phrased in the ca...

It was a "third quarter moon". Not "quarter" by itself, and certainly commonly called "half". I think of it as although it's face is half lit from our perspective, it's deemed a quarter moon since it's a quarter of the way through a full cycle of phases: https://c.tads...

I expected the link in the text to “eight successive” exposures to show those eight individual images instead of a picture of eight cats. Any explanation? It meant to be humorous. Yes, it's true, even astrophotographers and astronomers have a sense of humor. There are often such links to "cute...

Isn't that a half moon? It was a "third quarter moon". Not "quarter" by itself, and certainly commonly called "half". I think of it as although it's face is half lit from our perspective, it's deemed a quarter moon since it's a quarter of the way through a full cycle o...

What a fascinating view are prominences of the sun in different shapes, that is a naturally occurring phenomenon of the sun that is overwhelmingly making us wonder what will happen next. Speaking of the sun's future, at present, the sun is getting nova and will get bigger in 3937 as Nostradamus pre...

Well, start by considering the density. The density of a prominence is about the same as the density of Earth's atmosphere somewhere between 30 and 50 kilometers above the surface. (The pressure at that height is a fraction of a percent of the surface pressure. Not a hard vacuum, but pretty thin.) ...

The " documented by NASA" link to the SDO movie that this clip was apparently processed from shows this (after rotating and flipping to match the APOD): traingular prominence on sun from SDO.jpg So, ignoring the intense heat that close to the Sun, if the Earth were embedded in this promin...

The " documented by NASA" link to the SDO movie that this clip was apparently processed from shows this (after rotating and flipping to match the APOD): traingular prominence on sun from SDO.jpg So, ignoring the intense heat that close to the Sun, if the Earth were embedded in this promine...

In this picture I see little to no asymmetry in the craters that I would expect if the impactor hit at an angle other than 90 degrees to the surface. Now that I think of it, this seems to be common to most of the pictures I have seen of other cratered surfaces. Am I missing something? Or is it the ...