Starship Asterisk*

I was MIA from this forum for several years and only just discovered this heartbreaking news. I used to come here and read the discussions every day, and always looked forward to whatever baffling tangent Neufer's brain would lead me down for the day. I signed the Declaration of Reasonable Doubt tha...

I think it may be worth noting that some monitors might not be capable of seeing Leo I, for instance, at work I have a monitor used in conjunction with a laptop, and the monitor can't see it no matter how much I fiddle with the brightness/contrast/color, but the laptop screen shows it just fine. Fo...

In the explanation to the image it states "Just above Regulus, the very faint smudge of light is actually the Leo I dwarf galaxy, 800,000 light-years away and almost lost in the glare of the bluish hued bright star.". It must be very faint as I cannot make it out, so I wonder if anybody e...

Woohoo! I don't have to click through 4 links to get to APOD anymore! Everyone else I know just seems to be glad the panda cam is back, glad that I'm not the only one who missed NASA.

Oh, and beautiful pic by the way, love these types of shots.

This might be redundant, but I didn't see specific wavelength / energy clearly listed. To add some detail to the the above image link, I believe that red, green, and blue correspond to 0.5-0.8 keV (mostly, K lines of O), 0.8-2.0 keV (mostly, K lines of Ne, Mg, and Si), and 2.0-5.0 keV (mostly, sync...

I absolutely love this image! Quite happy that this one ended up as a repeat.

I found it! It's playing hide and seek. Could barely make it out in the high resolution image, didn't need to zoom though.

Beautiful APOD! Can't wait to go to Iceland some day... thank you for this!

No apod makes me happier than one with both lightning and a volcano... talk about a triple whammy when you throw in some stars.

My all-time favorite: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120730.html

In pictures of the small, it would be very helpful to have a scale. Please. A most enjoyable picture of a fascinating critter. The "pictured above" link has the magnification. (250 times when printed 10cm wide). http://images.sciencesource.com/preview/14006150/BS8236.html Fascinating crea...

It's important to note here that this tractor idea is by no means a solution to every asteroid. This COULD be the preferred solution to a larger asteroid (that would cause enough damage such that we should be worried), with a well known orbit, that we know is on a future collision path with earth, w...

Interesting comet-brightness graph I found today while looking for predicted brightness graphs of these two, looking forward to seeing something similar with Lemmon and PanSTARRS added, and maybe a comparison of predicted to actual magnitudes. :-) http://www.lesia.obspm.fr/perso/nicolas-biver/comets...

Do we know if NGC 6822 has a (super)massive central black hole? It doesn't appear to... Also, is it likely just a comparatively young but future elliptical galaxy? All the stars in this particular image look young and blue, but others it does seem to have an older appearing population of main sequen...

I saw a splashing fish as well... and maybe a scorpion? And an angry face being punched in the eye?

I want to be a tourist in Sweden some day... what a lovely country. Sigh. Oh, also a lovely sun pillar.

Love the colors of the stars and the SMC here, this image makes me long to see the southern hemisphere's night sky in person. Some day...

Stunning image! Can't wait to see the official release... enjoyed that make-shift video quite a lot as well.

For some reason I was expecting one of those 2 last links to say something about this... http://discovermagazine.com/2012/apr/07-does-rain-come-from-life-in-the-clouds/?searchterm=cloud bacteria In any case, there it is. Lovely photo, I've always enjoyed a moon halo, I've seen a few nice ones in my ...

That skyscraper is definitely in Dubai. I noticed a lake below that mountain, and I don't think Everest has a lake, although a helicopter HAS landed on Everest so the shot alone being aerial (likely from a helicopter) does not rule out Everest. Kind of looks like it though, but I don't know for sure...

Humble Suggested Title Revision:
Our Story in One Minute (Except Creationists, since they didn't evolve with the rest of us)

How many more record breaking weather events do we need to witness before people stop denying global warming is happening all around us... and that all likely evidence points to us as the causal factor? Either we need to elect more knowlegable people, or else. This issue needs to be addressed immedi...

For anyone interested in a more visual/learning/fun aid to understanding orbits a bit better (and velocities at apoapses/periapses), the smart-phone game/app called Osmos is quite a lot of fun. I found myself visualizing the game while reading through these comments at least.

So was this little flare caused by that infalling cloud of stuff I recall reading about not too long ago? A month or 2 ago maybe? I seem to recall reading something that mentioned we should be seeing a flare up at least but can't remember where I saw that. This dark energy star theory does sound qui...

could there be something like this preventing us from seeing beyond the 'edge' of the known universe? How far we can see is directly related to the speed of light and the age of the universe. We can only see as far as the light/photons have traveled since the Big Bang (the ones that travelled towar...

The last sentence in the explanation is "Still, estimates indicate that planetary orbits would be stable within the habitable zone of Alpha Cen B, at about half the Earth-Sun distance ..." I wonder if there was intended to be more after "distance" but it got missed out? It just ...

I couldn't see anything other than a Chinese dragon until an Irish setter was mentioned, that I can see as well. I don't think it looks anything like a goat though, funny how people see different things I suppose.

Finally a picture of Greenland where it's actually green though!