Starship Asterisk*

Given this came from Spitzer and enhanced with false color, what does the heavy green represent even to coloring a nice spiral galaxy near the bottom? I also wondered about the red dots, the left one of which has a pretty halo. The "stunning infrared portrait" link says, " For this S...

To me the ghost looks like a white, fat Garfield the Grumpy Cat. He is sitting up on his hind legs. His right eye seems to be swollen though but his left eye is perfect. His mouth also seems to have been knocked over to his left side of the nose and he has two right ears on his head. There is also a...

I remain irritated that we are not ending Cassini by having it very slowly approach a ring to get a close-up showing ring thickness and composition. Perhaps it was dynamically not possible. I vaguely remember some remarks somewhere about "contaminating" a ring? Seemed silly to me. Oh, the...

I looked up the 'equinox definition' on Yahoo search and I got "a hybrid species resulting from the interbreeding of the horse family and the oxen family."

{Early April Fool]

Anybody else see the Easter Bunny on Mimas? About one quarter the way up from the bottom on the terminator line, the Easter Bunny is riding a broomstick. It's rear leg is in bright white light from its lap to the bent knee to the toes. Its front leg is shorter, maybe deformed, with slightly less bri...

In the expanded view next to the galaxy pointed out by Coil Smoke, there are two neat blue galaxies really close to each other. I wonder if they are colliding? Also look at the neat all red galaxy just above the ESA letters. I wonder why the galaxy is all red. Could it be due to the expansion of the...

Where's the Moon if this is a 360 degree panorama? According to Stellarium, on January 24 the Moon was closer to Saturn than Jupiter is to Spica in the picture. On January 25th the Moon was about 2/3rd closer to Mercury than to Saturn. On January 26 the Moon was closer to the Horizon than Mercury be...

neufer wrote:I noticed all the planets seem to be in a 3:2 resonance
with their neighboring planets a la Pluto/Neptune.

Not really all of them. Venus and Earth are closer to a 3:2 resonance (not quite) than Trappist-1 c and d.
3.25:2 for Venus and Earth, to 3.35:2 for Trappist-1 c and Trappist-1 d.

This image isn't new. I have seen it before. In the iconic movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, when Dave arrives at Jupiter and meets the alien black monolith, the aliens send him at light speed to their home planet. That is when we see that fantastic light show of the galaxies whipping past. Around when D...

I didn't know that Cygnus X-1 was called a microquasar. I thought it was just a black hole. Is that a new designation? Cygnus X-1 is a stellar-mass black hole, as the linked site says. A microquasar is when there is a companion star and material is pulled into the accretion disc at temperatures in ...

"Wikipedia doesn't even raise the possibility of a solid core yet." Did you actually read the Jupiter article in Wikipedia? Read first paragraph under the section "Internal Structure" Even the illustration of the internal structure has this caption, Quote; "This cut-away ill...

If this is a giant snowball how could snow be made out of molecules of carbon? I understand that snow is H2O or molecules of hydrogen and oxygen. No carbon in the formula.

Rays coming from our star are some of the more interesting things imaged. They appear to converge near the position of Earth. Looks like the Sun should be directly behind Earth and Venus. I am assuming those planets are between the probe and the Sun. How could Earth appear 50% illuminated in either...

And, independently of that, clicking "reprocessed colors" above brings up an image of a blue cat. What is that all about ? My guess is that cat is a Russian Blue cat. Now I have never personally seen a Russian Blue in real life, so I had to look it up in Google Images. Their blue color is...

http://www.clarksvilleonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Colliding-Galaxy-Pair-Takes-Flight-2.jpg Arp 142 and small blue edge-on galaxy. NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage Team Can't resist showing you this alternative portrait of Arp 142, where the Penguin galaxy, sad to say, has fallen on its back. But ...

Ceres twin ? Not really, Ceres doesn't have a twin. Ceres, a former asteroid, now a Dwarf Planet is nearly twice as large as the next largest asteroid, Pallas. If you are meaning size then Ceres would be the next smaller object in a list of objects in the inner Solar System. Ceres is 914 km in diam...

What collision? Craters are believed to be created in three different ways. By volcano, either molten lava or cryogenic water. By explosions either nuclear or conventional. (this is rare for natural objects the size of moons.) Or, by collisions with wandering asteroids or comets. Since the word imp...

I wouldn't end a mission, until I had something to take its place... is there a Cassini II?? Because I am sure there is sooo much more to learn. :---[===] * Cassini is running out of rocket fuel. You might experience that when your car gas tank is empty. If they don't collide it soon then it would ...

I am amazed this image is in focus from the tree to the planet, considering the Earth is moving at a considerable pace. Some sort of computer imaging shenanigans ? As an amateur photographer I know that with a standard lens, infinity focus is about 35 feet. That means everything farther away than 3...

Yes, isn't it strange that the smaller galaxy that is colliding isn't deformed at all. I am not an expert but what if they aren't actually colliding? Imagine that NGC 1317 is actually nearly the same size as NGC 1316, but it is twice as far away. It just happens to be in our line of sight by coincid...

Re: Charles E, Actually it is 60 times or recorded history if you think Homer is the first Greek historian. 40 times if you think the first hieroglyphs were written in the Step Pyramid of Djoser, or 36 times if you think recorded history started with the Sumerian's Cuneiform writing of about 3,000 B...

If a satellite is in geostationary orbit over the equator which means it orbits at the same speed as the Earth then that means it hangs over the same spot in the sky. If the apparent motion of the Orion Nebula is from bottom to top in the video wouldn't the satellite be going from top to bottom? Sin...

Chris, I think it is more like an 180° panorama since it is east to south to west. Or 200° since there is a little extra at west point.

ta152h0 wrote:wonder if it will start ?

If the batteries stayed charged for 44 years, may be. Just remember that Apollo 17's LRV had to use up some extra juice to film the blastoff of the Lunar Lander and broadcast live to the Earth.

ANN, Foreground stars in the Milky Way tend to have diffraction points. Regarding the three purple stars in a line to the left of the central core, I enlarged the picture and enlarged my browser as much as possible to examine those stars. I can just make out a diffraction line in the middle star, wi...