Starship Asterisk*

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/calendar/S_221228.jpg Messier 88 Explanation: Charles Messier described the 88th entry in his 18th century catalog of Nebulae and Star Clusters as a spiral nebula without stars. [snip] Messier never used the word “spiral”; his exact words were “Nébuleuse sans étoile.” Spi...

It’s happened again. Someone, somewhere posted a mnemonic for me to remember which star is Pollux and which star is Castor. As always, I have forgotten the mnemonic, and do not remember which star is which. I just read the damn description, and in the few seconds since, I have completely forgotten w...

I created this simulation, based on the stars’ B – V indices, a few months before the IAU made the names official. I assumed a white point of D65, so the moderately blue stars look less blue than in Mr. Jittasaiyapan’s montage. garnet_star-norm.png Sorry, Ann, I was looking specifically at the Garne...

Jim Fenner wrote: ↑Sun Dec 18, 2022 10:12 am Also not meaning to boast, but from the latitude of Sydney, all these stars are visible in the course of a year.
Capella, Vega and Deneb do suffer from low altitude

Same from the Virgin Islands. The 5 stars in Centaurus and Crux are the lowest, with Acrux culminating 9° above my horizon.

Aurorae can be (and have been?) seen by only 2% of human beings. I suppose that may be why photographs of them are so popular, but I would guess that APOD pics of them are way more than 2% of the total historically.. That’s a strange criterion for selecting APOD photos. Total solar eclipses are see...

APOD Robot wrote: ↑Sun Oct 30, 2022 4:05 am And pretty soon, ghostly shapes may dance in your neighborhood too.

Not bloody likely.

Excellent composition!

What’s up with this? The video as posted is too large to fit on my screen, so I chose Watch on YouTube, but all I get are right wing propaganda shorts. YouTube Shorts is broken. Since the day this APOD was posted, when I click on a YouTube Short, I almost always get a totally random video, and have...

The California Nebula shines with the telltale reddish glow characteristic of hydrogen atoms recombining with long lost electrons... Most likely providing the energetic starlight that ionizes much of the nebular gas is the bright, hot star Xi Persei just to the right of the nebula. This means that ...

What’s up with this? The video as posted is too large to fit on my screen, so I chose Watch on YouTube, but all I get are right wing propaganda shorts.

APOD Robot wrote: ↑Tue Sep 06, 2022 4:05 am Also captured were unusual cloud ripples above the pileus cloud.

I don't see anything above the pileus cloud except blue sky.

APOD Robot wrote: ↑Tue Aug 23, 2022 4:05 amWhat you can't see is that, on this night, the astrophotographer brought along his father who, although unskilled in modern sky-capture techniques, once made it a point to teach his child about the sky.

My father did the same, though perhaps not as extensively as Mr. Looten.

xdm wrote: ↑Sat Jul 16, 2022 10:02 am

NorbVor wrote: ↑Sat Jul 16, 2022 7:01 am This is not first quarter, but last quarter phase.

This is first quarter, but a mirror image of first quarter.

This confused me as well. It would have been helpful to explain in the description that this is a mirror image.

xdm wrote: ↑Sat Jul 16, 2022 10:02 am Why present a mirror image, by the way

Artistic license?

I have questions about Uranus and Neptune. I was barely able to pick out Neptune with averted vision in a binocular last night, and it was next to a brighter star. There’s no way it could have been as bright as in this photo without a whole bunch of stars showing. I haven’t seen Uranus yet—I haven’t...

The game literally does not fit on my computer screen.

Guest wrote: ↑Tue Jun 14, 2022 10:31 amRabbit!

That’s what I always see.

Ann wrote: ↑Sun Jun 12, 2022 4:11 am APOD 12 June 2022 Man or Lady in the Moon.png

The Lady in the Moon!

Ann

I guess... a late stage Picasso?

That’s the first time I’ve ever seen the Man in the Moon delineated that way. And it seems rather selective and arbitrary from among all the dark markings on the Moon.

Sometimes I wonder if all the “Man in the Moon” talk is a worldwide conspiracy to personally gaslight me. I just don’t see it.

Did anyone else see meteors last night? It was a good night for them! I looked out my front door shortly after 12:30 last night, and it was immediately clear that I wouldn’t see anything over the neighborhood streetlights. So I got dressed and drove to an unlit scenic lookout. There was no meteor s...

"Seen from Alpha Centauri, our own Sun would be a bright yellowish star in the otherwise recognizable constellation Cassiopeia." Is this really saying the Cassiopeia would look about the same to us if we were standing on a planet around Alpha Centauri? At first think, that seems like it w...

MarkBour wrote: ↑Mon Mar 28, 2022 3:40 pm I'm a bit concerned that I haven't seen any posts from neufer in a while.

Neufer shows up in the “yellowish star” link (one of the solar spectrum illustrations). But yeah, he hasn’t posted here since March 1.

Fun fact: Alpha Centauri A is the same spectral class as the Sun, and Alpha Centauri B is cooler. Therefore, if we could see it at a distance, the Sun would appear no more yellow than Alpha Centauri.

I can barely make out the stars of Chamaeleon, and they looked too close to the horizon for the south celestial pole to be visible. To rule out camera lens distortion, I looked up Madivaru’s latitude. It is 4.5° north. The south celestial pole cannot be above the island in this picture.

I see a raptor with outstretched wings. I cannot make out a whale.