Starship Asterisk*

So I'm confused. Are we explaining DE or DM? The hunt "missing mass" is a famous one. Significant dust reservoirs have been observed for decades - indirectly (and maybe controversially) seen by extinction of background objects surrounding galactic clusters, as well as hot X-ray emissions. ...

Hello alter-ego Thanks for your clarification. Once again I've been on a chess hiatus in an effort to refloat a chess opening .... Hello again, astrolabe, Back in the day, the risky King's Gambit was a favorite of mine for fiery play. Unfortunately I wasn't good enough to be successful with my equa...

Hello alter-ego, Second, unless we have two "bubbles" colliding (this is just a comment to elude to a point, I don't believe any theory allows for this kind of multi-verse collision), anything "outside" our Visible Universe (i.e. BEFORE the Big Bang), I have a hard time thinking...

''Kashlinsky speculates that the dark flow extends "all the way across the visible universe," or about 47 billion light-years, which would fit with the notion that the clusters are being pulled by matter that lies beyond known horizons''. Some clarification here. First, the "Visible ...

This discussion is very much the pot calling the kettle black (or vice versa). I mean a pot is different than a kettle, but they share the same environment and end up looking similar after awhile.
We should take this up on Twitter.

Now I don't think of APOD as a blog, but that's a biased opinion.

Check this out. I made a composite picture of the ISS POD and Google Earth. I used the ISS location and time to set the camera position, and I set the look angles using the Earth's horizon and the Sun's reflection in the ocean. Iv'e done this with Yuri's Planed APOD a couple years ago and it works w...

Bingo! Point Nemo is the most meaningful description I've heard yet for the POD "landscape." If my stated ISS position is correct, Nemo's location is ~700 miles from the nadir (ground track position), so in the picture, that would put it about in the clear zone below the ISS.

After correcting a timing / input error I made for the APOD picture, the corrected ISS location is ~460 miles southwest of my earlier stated position: At 2:04UT, the ISS is 2000 miles west of S. Chile coast, Lat. 41 28' S, Long. 113 14' W , 1000 miles south of Easter Island, and 2250 miles north of ...

Thanks for that response, David. It's was a moral booster. That snippet of land you mentioned is what I stubbornly clung to. That little bit of "land" is what originally convinced me that the time-stamp time zone was NOT UT. It wasn't until I discovered the ISS orbital path without assumin...

And the answer is: ISS sub-orbital position = 1800 miles west of souther Chile, Lat 37 38' S, Long 106 14' E. Time = 2:04 UT View = Westerly, all ocean and clouds Distance from Antarctica = 2500 miles, south of ISS. First, I pinned down another photo in the ISS fly-around sequence: S130E012150, Tim...

Amir - Hats off to you for struggling through that excercise.

This may be my last post on this as I'm starting to go in circles (no pun intended). I am much less sure of my earlier statements as I now have four candidate solutions based on only simple criteria: - Two in Northern Hemisphere (Maine / Nova Scota, Italy) - Two in Southern Hemisphere (South Austral...

Well, in my biased viewpoint, I'm further convinced the picture is over the Mediterranean, most likely Italy's boot or Sardinia. I personally viewed the ISS / Shuttle early morning on Feb 20 (also a very reasonble terminator condition for solution). Their observed separation was ~15 degrees (approx ...

The amount of clouds really make this tricky. After some effort locating morning / evening terminator locations that are correctly coincident with ISS and the view perspective, I've landed upon the boot of Italy as the barely visible land mass. Unfortunately, I could not make sense out of the time s...

Hello, Here is my two-bits towards understanding the light pillars - I've only read a couple of replies but I couldn't help diving into HaloSim to uncover halo behavior, especially related to light pillars Long story short: Ice crystals have it. To first order, a combination of ice plates and horizo...

Thanks for asking. It's not perfect, but it does the job.

http://picasaweb.google.com/okubet/APOD ... 1848016098[/img]

-Clear Skies

I was curious what area the picture actually covered. Carefully using the published photo data and with help from Google Earth (GE) I snared it. The sun's direct reflection is centered on the northern end of Taiwan (Taipei) and the small island, Yonaguni-shima, about 100mi ESE from Taipei. The massi...