Starship Asterisk*

But this was a test firing, where the usual payload would have been blocks of concrete, Thanks for this explanation. I thought the world - or at least NASA - had gone mad. That's not NASA. Its Elon Musk and SpaceX By the way, anybody noticed just after 4 hours the roadster 'windshield' (the helmet ...

I remember watching it right in front of my house back in 2004. Then they called it a Transit of Venus instead of a Venus Solar Eclipse. I was lucky because in the Toronto area it happened just a few minutes after sunrise, when I could look directly at the Sun with my own eyes. I could see Venus wit...

What happened to the intruder galaxy? I'm guessing it is the smaller galaxy on the left with all those blue newly formed stars surrounding it. And Ann how do you know the small galaxy wasn't double or 4 times the size it is now before it collided with the cartwheel?

Interesting visuals, but I question the choice of Dvorak's serenade music, which is gentle, boring and actually depressing. If you were actually sailing through the nebula, your life would be in constant danger from bombardment of deadly gamma rays, cosmic rays and ionized nuclear particles. Not to ...

Utterly FANTASTIC! Today's APOD picture was photographed 6 days in the future! Or is that, will be photographed 6 days in the future? This must mean somebody out there has invented a working time machine. Far out!

I think there may be an error in the description, which says the galaxy "spans" 50,000 light years. The embedded link goes to another image which says the tails extend more than 50,000 light years from the nucleus, so that would make the galaxy span over 100,000 light years. One of the de...

No, Jupiter is just a gas giant planet. A cold Jupiter that is almost a Hot Jupiter as seen around hundreds of exoplanet systems. The reason why it is not a Hot Jupiter is because Jupiter is farther away from the Sun than Mercury is.

Thank you for the outstanding image and informative post. If I understand correctly, the first few sentences are a brief description of a stellar life cycle; if that's the case, shouldn't the "few million years" be a few billion? Nope, [super] massive stars burn fast, bright, and die youn...

Know what? With this new close up of the Horsehead Nebula, with the shape of the snout, it looks more like a moose head than a horse. Should we start a petition to rename it the Bullwinklehead Nebula?

If there is no up or down in zero-g, why is her hair all standing one way, on its end? Notice that the water doesn't pour up or down but just forms a sphere and is propelled in the direction from momentum. It seems the solution would be for her to stand upside down, with her feet to the ceiling, the...

Just wondering, but is that pale blue dot visible just above the Martian horizon on the left hand side of this photo, the Planet Earth? And the nearby gray dot The Moon? And the other stars a little farther up, is one of them Venus and another Jupiter? Is this a picture showing a conjunction of plan...

How do photos collated/collaged over 8.5 hours only have one radiant point? Correct me if I'm wrong, but all meteor showers have one radiant point. The Earth spins, the heavens don't. The satellite dish would have moved against the sky background in 8 hours, so I would think the satellite dish in t...

Nice to see that when science writers err they write you're when they mean your. Pleasant change from constantly seeing commoners on social media write your when they mean you're.

Shouldn't Taurus be facing Orion, not sneaking up on his back? It's confusing, but I think this isn't a graphical map of the sky, but it is a time drawing, portraying time. Like APOD said it is a clock. Taurus is high above the word December, which means it is high in the sky, or rising in the East...

Yes, I also am curious whether that is the actual sound vibrations Mercury makes rotating, that an astronaut in orbit would hear, or whether that is lower subliminal sounds that were processed for humans to hear?

Is four the minimum number of eclipses of all types that can occur in one calendar year? I seem to recall that solar eclipses can be bracketed by lunar eclipses both two weeks before and after the solar. Bruce That is true. 4 is the minimum number of eclipses in a calendar year. 7 is the maximum. B...

My 8th science class would to know...what phase of the moon would you say is visible at about 5 seconds of the clip. We are having a tough time with the hole rotation of Earth vs. revolution of the moon. Thanks! First I'd need to determine whether the space probe took pictures with North up or Sout...

Also unusual is that Iceland seems to have a Star Trek type force field up. None of the blue smog no matter how bright can pass over Iceland! It gets whipped around like as if the Iceland shields are up. The brown Sahara dust smoke though passes right over Iceland.

I like these kind of things. Well done. There is something similar in the beginning credits of the TV show,The Big Bang Theory, except it is done in about 30 seconds. If you haven't seen the show, try to check it out, just for this intro. The music is even fantastic. I disagree though with Ann. I wo...

"They lie from 800 to 1,500 light-years away,"
Some other site "Universe guide dot com/star/Mintaka" says new 2007 Hipparcos data has a new measurement of Mintaka being 692.49 light years away. Yet Wikipedia has Mintaka at 1,200 lys away. Wonder what the true distance really is?

Technically Burroughs' Princess of Mars was already written in 1912 when it was serialized in a magazine, but since you said the novels, you are correct since they were published from 1916 to around 1947. But it depends what you mean by Wright Brothers? Assuming the first airplane powered flight at ...

One of the moon myths that completely puzzled me was the man on the Moon. I could just not see him. Now with these pictures and the colors I see it. You tilt you head to the left a bit and you see a rough image of Bart Simpson kicking a gray soccer ball. Bart has a yellow head, he is wearing a blue ...

My speculation of its origin. The "first recognized" link from the University of Hawaii says that it came from the direction of the constellation of Lyra. Lyra is of course a huge space, but the closest star there is Vega at 26 ly. Wonder if they can trace it to Vega, taking in considerati...

So if nearby Andromeda Galaxy would be in the picture, what would Andromeda's apparent size be? M31 is twice the diameter of NGC 891, and it is about 12 times closer. Would that mean Andromeda would appear 14 times bigger than NGC 891, or 24 times bigger?

The color is simply ghoulish looking. Reminds me of looking into a witch's boiling cauldron. By the way, sure hope there isn't a witch head nebula out there. That image would simply be spell-bounding.