Starship Asterisk*

I haven't seen anything from Art on the apod discussions recently. Art, where art thou? Does anyone else have news of Art?

[magical thinking] Regardless, I've learnt to express indifference for upcoming celestial events, as enthusiasm seems to attract inclement weather. [/magical thinking] We have found that the more you plan and prepare for an event the more likely the weather will not cooperate. Beautiful photo today...

Thanks for the correction. But what if "dark energy" proves to be a transient phenomenon and the universe starts collapsing? Then we would be able see new stuff, right? Transient is a bad word to use here. Dynamic might be a better word. To me you could ask the same question except replac...

When we talk about incredibly distant galaxies, they invariably have very high redshifts. We know that they are old because the spectral lines in the light that is only now reaching us from these galaxies have been shifted enormously to the red by the expansion of the universe. This is the source o...

But remember that we can only see things whose light has had enough time to get to us. So the observable universe has an edge, from our location in space, even though there's probably stuff beyond the edge that we can't see yet. Not "yet". "Never". The boundary of the observable...

I often get lost when trying to get my mind round the time scale of the Universe and each time I think I have started to understand things something will crop up that causes me to again realise that I really know nothing! In the information brought up through the 'stunning close-up view' link it st...

By the way, M5 is high in the sky after midnight these days, and will be well placed for evening viewing in June and July. You can see M5 as a smudge of light in binoculars, and it's glorious in even a small telescope.

Last week professor Graeme Smith of UC Santa Cruz and Lick Observatory gave our astronomy club a lecture on the distribution of globular clusters within the Milky Way, their ages, chemical compositions, and the types of stars found within them. The take away was that globulars are fossil remnants of...

There are probably fewer galaxies that are pristine than ones that are interacting or have in the past. How could we recognize a pristine galaxy if we saw it? Good question. It would probably be a spiral, since other forms are typically the result of mergers. But given the right sort of collision, ...

It's a trick of visual perspective. The Moon is the apparent vanishing point of the laser beam. We use this same trick to use laser pointers to point out particular stars in the night sky, although the stars are of course much farther away than the Moon! Indeed, for all the stars ever pointed out w...

How can the beam be visible its full way to the moon? Beyond earth atmosphere there's no particles where the laser can be scattered. It's a trick of visual perspective. The Moon is the apparent vanishing point of the laser beam. We use this same trick to use laser pointers to point out particular s...

Tszabeau wrote:The galaxy on the left appears to have revealed its' heart. What is the red streak on the right?

That red streak appears to be a background spiral galaxy seen edge-on. Maybe one of these, but I dunno.

I believe a carbon tax is the best strategy. But above all, I believe in doing something. Anything is better than the current nothing. Yes, doing something is the most important thing. And lots of individuals, communities, and even governments around the world are doing lots of things to respond to...

Cap and trade is widely credited with being the primary factor in the massive reductions in air and water pollution in the northeast U.S. after the 1970s. There is no doubt that it can work if properly implemented. Again, I don't know much about all the ins and outs of different economic strategies...

But if we raise the price of energy beyond the affordability of the poor, the only options they will have are 1) Burn wood for heat and cooking. (Removing trees from the carbon sink and adding smoke particulates and CO2 into the air) 2) Freeze and don't cook (a die off of the poor masses that can't...

This is actually a very similar proposition to what is being discussed today in the blogosphere WRT Climate Change and how current populations are being subjected to the probability of significantly higher energy costs through the institution of Clean Energy Programs (like Wind & Solar) which a...

ta152h0 wrote:Nice presentation, like a B25 doing a low pass over the field ( I like B25's ). ...

Beyond wrote: ... I like B-52's. ...

I would guess that neither of you gentlemen have ever been on the receiving end of a bombing raid.

It's a superb photo. It would have been a good choice to have been used as the APOD of March 5 2014 (Ash Wednesday). :wink: Or Wednesday February 18, 2015, for Western (Catholic and Protestant) churches. February 25 for Orthodox churches. Easter , and therefore Ash Wednesday, will come fairly early...

Awesome elemental energy. A very moving image, but I'm glad I wasn't standing there when the picture was taken.

Maybe not in our lifetime, but today's magic is tomorrow's science - assuming we dont destroy ourselves beforehand. Not really. For the most part, today's science is also tomorrow's science. Once we know something about the laws of nature, we rarely find out that we are wrong, except perhaps in [fi...

"Mr. Sulu, give me warp six to Kepler 186f." "Captain to crew: Our mission is to explore the region in and around the Kepler 186 system, looking for new life forms. We are finally going to see what is out there". At 500 ly, I think it is going to be awhile until we have anything...

I saw this same image of Kepler 186f on the front page of yesterday's San Francisco Examiner, with a teaser headline along the lines of "Have Astronomers Discovered Earth's Twin Planet?" and a subhead pointing to a page five story about SFSU Professor Stephen Kane, who is involved in the r...

We'd better find someplace else very soon, considering the rate at which we are making this planet uninhabitable. We will not find anyplace else. There is no place else. Not in our Solar System, and nothing beyond that is reachable. The reality is, making Earth into a human paradise is a vastly eas...

It's missing the moon, but perhaps the other planets will make up for it: http://www.vancleefarpels.com/us/en/article/10935/midnight-planetarium-timepiece https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUtUDSltl-M Thanks, Owlice. The watch is a heliocentric orrery, a different animal than a sidereal clock. Still,...

Recently I've been imagining a 24-hour analog clock that displays: sidereal time by rotation of the clock face around the celestial pole; solar time by rotation of the Sun on a hand centered at the ecliptic pole and moving along the ecliptic; and the phase of the Moon by the movement of another han...