Starship Asterisk*

I am so surprised to discover that this was visible in the afternoon sky, when the sun - obviously - was fully up. Venus is an easy naked eye object at any time of the day. The tricky bit is finding it, and focusing on it. For people who don't practice a lot (I always look for Venus when I'm outsid...

After an informative discussion with Margarita, I've realized that this image makes a lot more sense to me as a picture of Gould's Belt, with the Pleiades providing backlighting, rather than as a picture of the Pleiades per se.

geckzilla wrote:Thanks for coming here and answering those questions for us, Dave.

Yes, thank you!

My, that is awfully dusty! I wonder why the Pleiades don't look like that to the naked eye or through binoculars. I guess another way of asking the same question is, what was done to make this photograph show the dust so clearly. Chris already suggested there would be a long exposure. I'm guessing t...

The above quote... I see three moons in this shot. One is either in the plane with the others and just very much in the forground, or it is out of the plane. It sits directly below the left moon in the plane and about 1/3 of the way down to the pole. Way tiny. Beautiful composition. You have better...

I love that quantum mechanics is probablistic rather than deterministic. Anything can happen, although some things are more likely than others, and at either extreme there are the practical limits of "virtually certain" and "virtually impossible." Indeed. Your wavefunction exten...

Does anybody know which two moons we're seeing? The one in the foreground, toward the left hand side of the image, is an especially lovely gibbous moon.

... In my limited understanding of quantum mechanics, string theories notwithstanding, fundamental particles aren't really physical balls of stuff with a physical radius. Rather, they are more like roving probability waves. When the probability wave of one particle overlaps with the probability wav...

neufer wrote:1. Made or contrived by Art.

Thanks Art, but I was asking Rob.

I'll let somebody else answer Beyond's question and instead ponder the fact that Comet Lovejoy is apparently looking down on the only artificial feature on the Earth that is visible from space, except it isn't visible from space (at least not from the Moon and certainly not from the position of Com...

I'll let somebody else answer Beyond's question and instead ponder the fact that Comet Lovejoy is apparently looking down on the only artificial feature on the Earth that is visible from space, except it isn't visible from space (at least not from the Moon and certainly not from the position of Com...

Click back and forth between the cropped version of this image that appears on today's apod page and the full version that appears when you click on the front-page image. The full image is much more pleasantly proportioned, at least to my eye. And some of the links are just stunning ! :shock: :D An...

Click back and forth between the cropped version of this image that appears on today's apod page and the full version that appears when you click on the front-page image. The full image is much more pleasantly proportioned, at least to my eye.

This is an awe-inspiring image, by the way. I imagine that with martian winds and dust storms the tracks won't last forever, but they evoke for me the ruts left by 19th century settlers' wagons heading west across the North American prairies and deserts. (The Indians traveled more lightly, and didn'...

According to the International Astronomical Union , the large martian mountain informally known as "Mount Sharp" is officially named " Aeolis Mons ." Prior to the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity mission, the mountain was unnamed. The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory team planning...

The caption's comparison of the sizes of the Tarantula and Orion nebulas prompted me to look them up. According to sky safari 4: Object .............. Distance ............... Diameter ........... Apparent size ........ Visual magnitude Tarantula ..... 160,000 light years ..... 1833 light years .......

Since massive stars live fast and die young , it is not so surprising that the cosmic Tarantula also lies near the site of a close recent supernova . Thinking about that. We all know that when all the fuel is gone a star begin to die and at the final stage end like a white dwarf, neutron star, blac...

Sorry I'm not able to draw, but the whole darn nebula is is the eagle. The eagle's head is in the upper right, with the beak on the lower right side of the head. The wings are the large bright areas that extend from upper left to lower right. Shall we also share our interpretations of Rorschach inkb...

Perhaps we should ask this woman what she sees when she looks at M16.

How do the pillars form? Are they pulled out by the stars births? Do the pillars push the newborn stars or do the stars string the pillars out like breadcrumbs as the accelerate? What starts the motion of a newborn star? Does the nebula exert positive or negative momentum to it's child stars, relat...

It's very easy to see the eagle's wings and its hooked beak in this image. For a long time I had no idea why the Eagle Nebula was called that because I was only familiar with Hubble's Pillars of Creation. Outside of astronomy circles few people look at any pictures other than famous images from Hub...

Anthony Barreiro wrote: I wonder if that's why the blue reflection nebulae stand out in clear contrast in this image? There are no blue reflection nebulae visible in this image. The small bluish areas in this image get their color from OIII emission due to strong ultraviolet emission from very hot ...

Color theory is very complex. Consider just the simple fact that we may perceive identical colors created by a single narrow emission line or a rich mixture of wavelengths across the spectrum. Consider that we perceive a particular hue as different colors depending on intensity. The thing that dist...

I've been thinking about the question of creating colors by combining red, green, and blue light. Is this purely a technical issue for people who are creating digital images or television pictures, or is this analogous to what happens in nature? I think of the light that comes from the Sun or anothe...

I'd say brown requires two channels- red and green. Brown is low intensity orange, so you have about twice as much red as green, and no blue. I wonder if that's why the blue reflection nebulae stand out in clear contrast in this image? Low to middle saturation reds and pinks tend to use high levels...