Starship Asterisk*

All though this is a beautiful image, is APOD sure it is not a fabrication? The odd shape of the sun coupled with the somewhat pixelated sunspots lead me to believe this may be fabricated. After a closer look at other images on the submitters flickr that are clearly fabricated I wonder if this image...

The Apod RSS feed (http://apod.nasa.gov/apod.rss) has non UTF-8 characters, yet is declaring itself as UTF-8. The character in question is as follows on line 26: "Aurora Over Raufarh�fn " There are also a lot of non-escaped character data (CDATA) entries. Thanks for your attention. -Scott

The RSS feed currently has non-utf-8 characters yet is declaring itself encoded as utf-8.

Here is the problematic entity (December 07 APOD item):

"It�s the closest match to Earth that has yet been found."