Starship Asterisk*

This story is a little too anthropocentric and seemingly teleological for me - the universe didn't come into being so that we could emerge at the end as the natural apotheosis; Welcome to the forums! Right: the Universe wasn't created for us. But this is " Our Story." Someone on the Inter...

APGwynn wrote:The music accompanying the video amazing is the worst music I have ever heard.

Solution: mute APOD sound; click http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TD_pSeNelU

The aurora starting at 1:21 looks strikingly similar to 0:43 in this November 21 APOD - solar panel, cloud cover and all: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap111121.html The music is fitting (having been used in a Star Trek trailer!) and instantly reminded me of Michael McCann's more recent work in Deus Ex:...

Amazing stuff. Those side views of writhing aurora... There are no words. And that is one bright India-Pakistan border. Please replace the music. That track has hisses and pops like it was recorded from an old phonograph record. Not to start a flame war over musical taste, but I thought it fit extre...

These so called 'astronomers' better take a class in electrical engineering soon what exploded was not the star itself, it was the star's electric double layer that surrounds it, that 'exploded' ! due to an interruption in its electic current supply ! As the the current flow goes to zero, the resul...

If that were the case then Jupiter's moons are in a lot of trouble :!: Aren't you really referring to the much smaller Roche limit ? Oops! Yeah, I was confused. Fortunately for the moons, they're within Jupiter's Hill sphere ("sphere of influence"). The most common type of collision would...

Very cool analyses, neufer. The elliptical insertion area you compute for Jupiter, 200 solar areas, corresponds to 20 000 Jupiter areas, or about sqrt(2e4 / pi) * 7e7 m / (5.2 AU) = 0.7% of Jupiter's distance from the Sun. For comparison, the radius of Jupiter's Hill sphere (inside of which a body l...

[...] combining two or three images taken at different exposures to provide detail in shadows and highlights. At least one camera can do this internally and automatically. High dynamic range imaging . All too often I think "nice graphics" and then realize I'm looking at an HDR image and n...

i know impacts happen on all celestial bodies, would i be correct in thinking impacts are a lot more common or likely with jupiter because of its huge gravitational pull? That's an interesting question, one I've thought about a lot in the past. I don't know a good way to answer it without some sort...

Interesting debate. I wish I had the knowledge and time to join in. However, in a fashion, we're all on a stage, engaging in a public debate. We have an audience, people who randomly visit this forum and read the posts. The thoughtful ones will read our posts and may decide on the issue of AGW based...

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap090524.html While giving my workspace a long-overdue cleaning today, I rediscovered a great folded poster of the Carina Nebula I picked up from STScI last summer. I posted it up alongside M51 , a star chart, and Pink Floyd's Back Catalogue , then checked out APOD a...

(If you do find out, be sure to let us know.) I was hoping to post a link that would beg the question and motivate someone else to answer it for me. I know that turnabout is fair play, but I did get my bid in first. I'll try to answer. Grain of salt and all that! First, why should a ring form at al...

It's an April Fool's joke, right?

For a real answer, see http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmo_02.htm#MD (Ned Wright's cosmology pages, linked to from March 29th's APOD).

A rocket ship travels with velocity v (vis a vis the earth) in direction x. The rocket ship sends a laser beam out the side of the ship in direction y; the rocket ship sends a stream of ping pong balls out the side of the ship in direction y; the rocket ship sticks a yardstick out the side of the s...

I can remember a sophomore year physics quiz question from M.I.T. (1964): A rocket ship travels with velocity v (vis a vis the earth) in direction x. The rocket ship sends a laser beam out the side of the ship in direction y. What angle does the laser beam make with the y axis as observed from eart...

I can remember a sophomore year physics quiz question from M.I.T. (1964): A rocket ship travels with velocity v (vis a vis the earth) in direction x. The rocket ship sends a laser beam out the side of the ship in direction y. What angle does the laser beam make with the y axis as observed from eart...

Sorry to divert back to optics, but NoelC and Chris's discussion made me call into doubt what little I thought I knew about telescopes. Chris's 1:1 magnification thought experiment helped. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the only way to fit all the light gathered by a large telescope through your pupil...

This discovery is awesome (as much as the Fomalhaut one). Nice going, scientists! Pretty cool! It seems (from a back of an envelope calculation) that the apparent diameter of the planets (based on their angular sizes) is about 2000 times that of Jupiter. This seems rather large. Could this be due to...

Google Sky isn't everything you want, but its very useful for browsing images of the universe in relation to each other. Thanks Forelan, I have recently acquired Starry Night which does a pretty good job. I just had an outburst onto the forum from my space faring wishful thinking. I have always wan...

The heavens are staring right back at us! Even more disturbingly similar to Sauron's eye is the dusty ring around Fomalhaut: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap050701.html Today’s caption brought my attention to our 5 billion year destiny. 5 billion years seems like a long time, but not so long as can’t be...

Amazing photo.

Ontario's a big place; on her website, the photographer specifies the location as Binbrook (southern ON, near Hamilton).

I need to get away from city skies...

Nothing is at a static state... and only 'nothing'. So how fast are we 'really' moving? (Relative to the Universe) Do we measure speed of travel at a fixed reference to Earth's relationship to the Sun... like planetary mass and weight? Or is there another factor in relating to other cosmic objects?...

From skimming this epic thread: A lot of people here do need to lighten up, and that includes reducing the ad-hominems toward the "whiners" who are free to post their opinions, however humourless. Today's APOD introduced me to this video (and its sponsor). I thought the premise was a silly...

Thread resurrection! To get to the next star quickly, we must shed our protons. That's gotta hurt. gravity does not pull on electrons Protons have inertia, electrons do not Where did these statements come from? The electron has mass (about 1/1836 that of the proton). Why limit ourselves to just that...

Hello and welcome, Nic! As Dr. Skeptic said, off-center forces on a system cause rotation. Let's consider a pre-galactic gas cloud as an example. Inhomogeneities in the primordial cloud interact with other clouds through off-center forces, i.e. torque, thereby picking up spin (or dumping spin into n...