Starship Asterisk*

"You know the Day destroys the Night; Night divides the Day..." Break On Through To The Other Side

Jupiter would most likely have a solid core, one the size of Earth and perhaps comprised of super-compressed pure carbon, that is diamond. Or it may be a mixture of ice and rock, who knows? The outer gaseous atmosphere would only be a few hundred miles deep at most, virtually a "paper-thin"...

I think the comparison of crossing an ocean on earth to crossing the cosmos creates a false dichotomy. The argument is as follows: Humans once thought crossing an ocean was impossible, but then they did it. Now they think crossing a galaxy is impossible, but because they crossed an ocean that was t...

I did some quick math and when this image was taken, New Horizons was cruising past Pluto at a leisurely 18 kilometers per second...! I would suspect that with its camera trained on the ex-planet, any stars in the background would appear as short streaks. It's an amazing little world, and even after...

"A manned flyby of Venus seems even more useless than a manned landing on Mars." Ooh, let's get a human colony onto the surface of Venus! Somehow! And another bunch of pioneers onto the surface of Pluto! Yes, all such things are goofy nonsense. And yet I hesitate: was having humans land o...

Beautiful. Like a mother whale carrying a baby along on her back. Most edge on pictures I have seen have tons of dust lanes where we can't see the light and beauty of the stars/clusters in the plane of the galaxy. I wonder why there's not much dust in this one and is that unusual or normal .. Or ma...

What is obvious to me is that in this image the scale of Valles Marineris is way too large. It looks to stretch across a third of the planet at the equator when it's actually something more like a tenth located in the northern hemisphere. Oh and it's 3000 kilometers, not miles so...

Hm - Running Chicken Nebula? Running from what? The Colonel Sanders Nebula?

Turn the image upside down and all the ridges become crevasses and the mounds, depressions. I wonder which is the true view. Agreed; I'm guessing those are crevasses and depressions. Very narrow ridges like those would seem much less stable than narrow crevasses. It would be really surprising to me...

Gosh, is the time soon coming when we finally say: OK, APOD, we are sick and tired of this stupid sky that we've seen in such gruesome detail, and so many times: get us ANOTHER and a BETTER sky! And do it NOW! How about a different and less boring UNIVERSE??? Jeeze, if isn't the same old Orion Nebu...

Aw, it's not such a bad depiction, y'all. There's a bit artistic embellishment, of course and the real thing may not even remotely resemble this fanciful image. I used to dabble in digital landscape rendering myself, so I have some appreciation for this posting.

It is not often an aurora borealis is seen in such a brilliant hue - and so sharply defined. It must not have lasted for very long, so the photographer had to have had a very small window of opportunity to capture this - in six frames. Nice work and good catch!

The image most likely was processed to show how the scene would appear if it was here on Earth. Yes, Martian skies are actually pinkish and hazy due to the suspended dust. No doubt there was water standing and flowing at this location (which is why Gale Crater was chosen for the Curiosity mission.) ...

The galaxy's protracted shape likely results from its continuing collision with the smaller galaxy IC 4970, visible just above center. Or.....possibly from its continuing collusion with the smaller galaxy IC 4970. Indeed, there possibly was more than one interaction in the distant past, and probabl...

Amazing in 1997 and amazing ever since. One of Hubble's finest!

It makes my head hurt just thinking about it...

And the great-great-great-great-etc-etc-etc-etc-10 10... -grandchildren of these three people, who may not look human at all, may actually be hit by Andromeda. Ouch. Duck and cover! Ann Duck and cover, indeed! I like your bit of wry humor, Ann... Should there actually be sentient lifeforms in the M...

It's quite an impressive structure, and more keeps being added on.

So this craft would possibly continue to accelerate along its journey (to where?). And supposing there was an exosolar destination - which would take hundreds, if not thousands of years to reach, how would it decelerate once it got there?

I took some pictures of the Crescent Moon and Mercury on the evening of same date, 08-April-2016, except I'm in New Jersey (near Philadelphia, PA) on the east coast of the United States, so I was capturing them about five (5) hours later than today's APOD taken from Lisbon, Portugal. The relatively...

There is no lunar atmosphere (or to the extent there is, we're not seeing it). Venus is simply so bright we see scattered and diffracted light around it, which overlaps the edge of the Moon. At the image plane, not in reality. My thinking as well. Earth's atmosphere also is probably affecting the s...

Is the writeup in error? How is it possible that the moon is nearly 0% illuminated and Venus is reported as 96% illuminated when they are adjacent in the sky and illuminated by the same sun? Nix that question !! :oops: Venus must be on the FAR side of the sun. :o It was stated that Venus was FAR fr...

In whichever incarnation it is imaged, we never seem to tire of viewing this magnificent celestial structure!

Momma always told me not to look into eyes of the Sun...

It appears that the comet is - or was heading directly toward an Earthbound view since there are no visible tails(?) Well, I sure hope to catch a glimpse...