Starship Asterisk*

Ann wrote:Wow, that's a pretty Moon, indeed.

Ann

Ann, am I just an old grouch? It does seem to me that all this "supermoon" business is bosh. Can the eye really detect the difference? Oh, I know there IS a difference, but in practice, one full moon looks just like any other full moon.

Oooooh! Love the 'candy dish' description! Very awesome image. *Boomer12k - do you have a link to the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field that you mentioned? When I searched for it, the link I got (here) , looks exactly like the Ultra Deep Field Image. (Could just be my untrained eyes, though.) TIA! :saturn:...

I wouldn't think that the medium between galaxies would be so dense that such a thing could happen. Could it be, that the dark matter is only this unsuspected intergalactic material? Nope. This intergalactic material is not unsuspected, it was detected in rich clusters of galaxies decades ago, by i...

Lordy me, I remember the first flyby of Mars - looked lunar, nothing but craters. Then our second mission flew by (we did two at a time in those days) and showed non-cratered terrain in the other hemisphere, and we cheered up. We've come a LONG way, baby!

Aha! I always suspected we were more interested in spelling and grammar than in science....now I know!

Ouch! I didn't mean to be so critical! And I should have said "galaxies etc" - my point wasn't that they aren't interesting - in fact they are far more interesting than meteors are - but that they distract from the point of the picture-of-the-day. As a picture of a meteor shower, it is a g...

Surely this should be called the Paragraph Nebula? That is, § ? Of course we are seeing it from the wrong side!

Chris Peterson wrote: image contrast is almost always stretched so that the lightest regions are displayed as white, and the darkest as black.

So true! And optical photos of the sky show the background as BLACK whereas it is in fact BRIGHT with zodiacal light.

"Constellations of lights connecting the densely populated cities along the Atlantic east coast of the United States" should be the FIRST phrase of the caption. Forgive me, you the creators should not bury the news. You do this almost always! Cure yourselves please!

Do you know Earth Science Picture of the Day does not seem to have reader response? Their lightning over Alberta today reminds me of the Rolling Thunder (like, I mean, ROLLING THUNDER) I heard as a child on the Canadian shores of Lake Huron.

Someone pointed out to me why there were so many injuries due to glass cuts: people saw the light flash, and like fools ... went to look out the window, just as the slower-moving sound wave arrived and smashed the window. During a war, NO one would ever look out a window after a bright flash.

I've seen this illustration before, but an idea occurred to me on looking at it again: depending on how a solid asteroid was rotating, we could simply paint one side black and one side white, so that the changed differential strength of solar light pressure would alter the path so as to miss Earth. ...

An oldie but goodie.

"The TDRS network continues to support major spacecraft like the International Space Station, the Hubble Space Telescope, and the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope." That, I think, is not what is meant. What is meant is, "The TDRS network continues to support major spacecraft such as th...

The FIRST words of the caption should be "artist's illustration."

Of all websites, I wouldn't think APOD would mess up a post such as this. You refer to Mt. Rainier as a mountain, in the geologic sense it is only a volcano, NOT A MOUNTAIN! I know the whole Mount part is confusing, but it doesn't mean you get to remain 'ignant'! -Your friendly pedantic neighbor Vo...

Okay .... help me out, here. The flare was photographed by NuSTAR recently ... but doesn't that mean that this flare actually happened 27,000 years ago? :?: Sure, but the same is true for EVERYTHING at the center of the galaxy. And, we see Andromeda as it was two million years ago, not as it is tod...

In 1957 or 1958 there was an American Astronomical Society meeting in my native Toronto. I was a kid in college, deeply interested in astronomy (I am a Professor of Astronomy today). Ambartsumian, from the Soviet Union, gave a paper proposing that there was a supermassive black hole at the center (I...

Is the star field correct for some date?

I would have expected this from some poor deprived person in the SOUTHERN hemisphere!

Try dropping a pencil in front of a crowd of people. They all know it is accelerating, but ask them if it LOOKS as if it is accelerating. Only about 5 - 10 % of the people say they can see the speeding up. But then, using "elephant-one, elephant-two, elephant-three..." as a timer, drop the...

Sorry to be sour, but the number of full moons in our arbitrary months is meaningless.

Think what fun their astronomers have!

I guess that is Leo in the background? Indeed! Interestingly, it was the orbit of Mars (as measured by Tycho Brahe) that made Johannes Kepler realize that the planets follow elliptical orbits around the Sun. The orbit of Mars is, incidentally, more elliptical than the orbit of the Earth. Ann I fina...

I guess that is Leo in the background?