Starship Asterisk*

Wow! Ophiuchus and Scorpius are turning into a veritable zoo, and it's not only snakes and scorpions that haunt these constellations! First it was Rogelio Bernal Andreo who showed us the amazing blue horse in this part of the sky, and now John A. Davis has found the most fantastic camel there! Where...

Thank you for your answers, astrolabe and makc. Astrolabe wrote: Since mass is a function of density vs. volume This doesn't sound right to me. I thought that mass is mass, regardless of the volume containing this mass. When I was a kid, we used to asked each other this question: Which is heaviest, ...

60moo wrote: Something relevant to this topic that has always eluded me: When an object is accelerated towards the speed of light, how much of the applied energy goes into the increase in velocity of that object, and how much goes into increasing the object's mass? All of it, and all of it. They're...

Hey, Rob, congrats on your globular cluster infatuation! We all need our space favorites. And even I realize that globular clusters are amazing things. I even realize that they contain colored stars. They are just not my thing, but they are your thing, and they are a lot of other people's thing, too...

Yet the whole universe is connected in a form of space time grid. What does that mean? Most of the Universe is not connected to the rest. Ah, Chris. The danger of illustrations. I've just tried to convince you that the Sun ins't yellow. Stubbornly, you have refused to acknowledge that I'm right. Ye...

I chose Rho Ophiuchi. Rogelio Bernal Andreo is a favorite of mine whose delightfully colorful crisp clear wide angle images have been made Astronomy Picture of the Day several times. Deservedly so, if you ask me. The Mars image is interesting. The tracks of a man-made machine are imprinted on the st...

It's nice to see Rob Gendler's version of the Hubble image of NGC 2207 and IC 2163, because he has a much better eye for color than the guys at Hubble. And Gendler is generally a master at processing astro-images. The galaxy pair is interesting. NGC 2207 looks like a loose collection of bright patch...

Wow, that's some solar prominence and eruption! Where is the "Wow, I'm amazed" emoticon? The comet and its lost tail was fun to watch too. As for the carbon stars, I don't doubt for a moment that such stars have been hugely important for the enrichment of the interstellar medium with heavy...

Hey, that's really really interesting! I'm fascinated by huge massive stars, and I really like massive young super-clusters. I'm almost envious of the Large Magellanic Cloud because they have that humongous young cluster inside the Tarantula Nebula! No, okay, I'm not really envious of them, because ...

One more post her, and then I'm done, I hope. Chris, you said this about the Hubble images of NGC 3310 and M104: The images you link, especially NGC 3310 and M104 are, in fact, carefully color balanced to reflect their true colors if our vision were more sensitive. I think you are mistaken about the...

Because the blue false color palette has greater dynamic range to the eye than other palettes, such as red or heat. Let me offer an alternative explanation. As a false color, orange is almost routinely used to show stars and other "hot objects". Therefore, astronomers may expect the gener...

There were a number of goodies here. I'm impressed. The cosmic zoo in the Large Magellanic Cloud was interesting, but you had to follow the link to see the whole picture and learn more about the wild beasts in there. There is an annotated image that you can find via the link. Don't miss it. Similarl...

I think they should have shown the Pluto picture in orange, since Pluto is an orange-brown world. And while I don't know anything about the color of Nix and Hydra, chances are that the Earth and Neptune are the only blue planetary bodies of this solar system. Why do astronomers have to use the false...

Note the "limb brightening" where you'd expect limb darkening. And the solar prominences are blue. And the Sun is kind of egg-shaped. Fascinating. There is something otherworldly about this Sun. Perhaps it is our Sun's evil twin in an anti-matter universe. Perhaps it is the Sun of Mordor, ...

They didn't image Pluto in blue light? And yet they showed it as blue, even though Pluto is about as non-blue as a planetary body can get??? :facepalm: I don't get it. This is the kind of false color usage that I have no respect for, sorry. It's like when they image the Sun in ultraviolet and show i...

Oh goodie, I love these kinds of polls! Hmmmmm... for me as a galaxy lover, the galaxy fare was unusually unsustaining here, although it was a lot of fun to see a supernova go off! Bravo! The resolution was kind of iffy, though. The Eagle nebula was beautiful, and the color of it was so much better ...

Oh my god!!!! The Kraken! Markus Maximus, I love it!!!!!

Ann

But hah! Art! You have almost convinced me! Who would be the greatest ever authority on the color of the Sun, if not Shakespeare? I bow to your erudition and insight, if not to your sense of color, oh grand master of wisdom and blank verse! :owl: I think I do believe in you and Will, so the Sun must...

It isn't the intent of most scientific astronomical imagers to produce results that show some sort of actual color. The intent is to ascertain what makes up objects, and to see structure. Yes, it is obvious that that is the kind of astronomy that the Hubble telescope usually does. And I don't consi...

As blue as you think it should. What you see is not necessarily what other people see. What you term "true color" is true... to you. Point taken. But do you think, all things considered, that it is a good idea to show the overall stellar populations of NGC 3310 and M 104 as having the sam...

I've just been going on about how I need astro-images to show objects in "true color" for me to appreciate them. And, yeah, yeah, I know that infrared images just can't ever be "true color" (because they depict objects and structures that are colorless in themselves, stupid). Wel...

Maybe your "absolute color sense" makes it difficult for you to separate the two; perhaps this is analogous to someone's with perfect (or absolute) pitch being bothered when singing or playing (early music) at A415 Hz rather than the modern tuning of A440 Hz. Interesting. I think you are ...

Good question, Owlice. To be honest, I'm frustrated about the way that everything is "shifted to the red" in astronomy, and now I'm not talking about what we know as redshift! No, my problem is that blue stars like Vega are described as white (that's a shift to the red), white stars like t...

But as directly viewed from the ground, the Sun is perceptually yellow! You mean, when you stare at the Sun to ascertain its color? :shock: So all these images are actually correct, other than being too saturated. "Too saturated" is only their middle name. I, too, admit that the light of ...

Note, however, that Vegans can only see GREEN. Belatedly: :lol: :lol: :lol: Chris wrote: Sometimes G stars are called yellow stars. In terms of visual appearance, the Sun is white. In terms of stellar classification, it is yellow. Again, I don't see the problem. What's the problem, Chris? Well, the...