Starship Asterisk*

Looks like layering on that one face. This thing had to have been part of something bigger. As for where to land, come in along the axis of rotation.

As long as a Perseid is seen "down there", it's fine. A Perseid "here" from an astronaut's perspective could be bad, indeed.

So, what? Are these clouds lit by sunlight or do they glow in the dark somehow? If the latter, what's the mechanism? Static discharge of some sort?

The view is to the north. The clouds are illuminated by sunlight coming over the North Pole during the summer months. Even though the Sun has set on the ground on the Arctic Circle, sunlight still extends to high altitudes far south of the Arctic Circle.

But, the streets of Manhattan are not aligned east and west, they are offset by 30 degrees. So, the view is that which occurs at the Summer Solstice, i.e., the beginning of summer, which occurred two weeks ago. The Vernal Equinox has nothing to do with the promised view.

This is all very confusing. Aren't we in fact seeing sunset at the Summer Solstice or something close to it? At noon on the solstice the Sun is directly overhead on the Tropic of Cancer and is just visible on the horizon on the side of the Earth opposite the Sun on the Arctic Circle. Twelve hours be...

How are the anomalous arms oriented? In the disk plane or normal to it?

But then, what can we do about it if anything? The US has 5% of the world's population and direct control over 2% of the world's air. We can spend billions to clean up our own air and have no effect whatsoever on the global problem. Our clean air will be blown out to the east to be replaced by crudd...

Has anyone specifically tied global warming to human activity, that is, a scientifically verifiable link and not just inference? (The hockey stick plot starts going up beginning in the 1800s, ergo,...)

Is SAO19158 behind the dust? It doesn't seem to be carving out a cavity.

It is called an illusion, after all.

I don't see it. The flash of light from the star would have been like a wave washing across a beach. What could be called echoes would be the the little ripples and splashes kicked up as the wave passed. We should be seeing a ring of light spreading out from the star and illuminating clumps of gas a...

The problem with black holes is that they are apparently invisible. Apart from x-ray observations that suggest something strange at the center of the galaxy, nothing else is visible there. Observers see extreme motions of stars at the galactic center but nothing obvious that might be causing the mot...

So, if stars in a globular cluster orbit a common center of mass, i.e., a virtual mass, why is it necessary to have a black hole at the center of the galaxy? Why couldn't the whole galaxy be rotating about a virtual mass?

Are the gasses there still gaseous or are they more like syrup?

Great idea when/if it works. Back in the early shuttle days during crew sleep periods, ground controllers would feed down-links from the payload bay cameras to the NASA TV Network for public viewing. You could watch for six or eight hours if you wanted. There was always something to see: thunderstor...

"Eating away the dust" What does that mean? Consuming somehow or merely pushing aside?

What you would have is a toroidal cloud that's being thinned to something like the thickness of Saturn's rings at the equator of the event horizon. The picture would be bowl-shaped on the other side as well.

And people want to go live there?

It looks like your basic, plain, ordinary low-gravity sink hole. There's another just like it on one of Mar's moons.

What happens to the material in globules when it's eroded away? The "eroded away" reference describes gas as evaporating. What are the mechanisms involved?

The view is mainly to the south and most of the color is due to aurora circling the South Pole. Since NZ is south of the Equator, sunsets occur to the northwest and the moonrise is to the northeast. You have to think down-under. The faint streak above the cloud is most likely a meteorite. The photo ...

Before going to live on Mars, maybe people should try living in the Australian Outback. Unbearably hot. Zero water, virtually no food. The aborigines managed it but only by constant movement. They were reduced to the absolute minimum needed for life. Clothing was an impediment. On Mars you'd need a ...

They were called "telephone poles". The wires carried low-voltage direct current, hence the glass insulators. The picture shows the vagaries of weather on Planet Earth and is very much in keeping with the APOD theme considering the global-warming issue. Actually, the picture was probably t...

As I understand it, atmospheric irregularities cause the image of a star, say, to bounce around in the telescope's field of view producing a blurred image. The position of the laser spot is known, but it likewise is bounced around by atmospheric distortion. By distorting the mirror, the spot -- and ...