Starship Asterisk*

Great picture. Reminded me of a scene in the Raiders of the Lost Ark movie.

Ann : Thanks for the interesting comments and pictures. It is all info that I would not see or understand the details on my own.

So far I have not seen the teapot whether I am viewing the image up close, normal distance, or crossed-eyes.

Thanks Ann. Your annotations are very helpful!!

Ann - Thanks for all the labels!

The "Stitched together on planet Earth" brings up the panaramic (detailed) view. Quite spectacular once you get it into the full view. https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/25640/mastcam-zs-first-360-degree-panorama/ Eclectic Man: I think the "damage" you are seeing is not damage, but ...

The "skycrane landing" link has a good animation of the entire landing sequence.

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/timeline ... t-landing/

3D Solar System view of the planets' orbits on July 14, 2015, looking down. Looks like Pluto is about as close to the Sun as it gets in its orbit. Summertime! Still long ways from the Sun.

About an hour after sunset on Dec. 13th, I looked out my front door (facing south) and there they were! Quite obvious. Mostly clouds since then, but hoping for a view as they get closer together.

So much slo-o-o-w motion activity!

Thanks Ann. Your annotated picture is very helpful.

Happy 25th Birthday. I visit APOD most days. Here is the first APOD picture I saved from back October, 2002 (if my notes are correct). Over a hundred more since then.

I happened to take pictures of the 2019 lunar eclipse within a few minutes on either side of the meteor strike time. What I notice is that my view of the moon is rotated as compared to views published at the time showing the strike location. My picture is on the left (just a handheld point/shoot cam...

thanks Chris. I did not know about the "a" symbol for year either.

The merger simulation video shows time as Gyrs, running from 0 to 3.9 or so. Is G a symbol for billions? I have not seen that before and Google search does not show any such symbol.

11/11/2019 I just watched a replay of the full transit on the NASA site. Mercury sure looks insignificant against the Sun.

Clicking on the APOD picture, then zooming in (click the +) on it shows incredible detail of the Rover and the Martian landscape.

I did a couple of clicks on the pic to full size. One can get a really nice close-up view of the lander.

Nice photo! Really is hard ot see the Jovian moons; but they are there! :D It's quite possible to see the Jovian moons with the naked eye. You just need to use something like a phone or power line a few hundred meters away to block Jupiter itself, and then one or more moons pop out, assuming they'r...

Thanks Ann. Your posts made a very good APOD also very interesting!

ESA_ACT_visualization_20190411.jpg Above is taken from one of the links in APOD's Black Hole Shadow post a couple of days ago. It tries to show how light/space in quadrants around the black hole are distorted and would appear to an observer. In a larger image one can see some light that is not only...

blackhole_raytracing_20190411.jpg Above is a screen shot from one of the links about making this black hole picture. It seems like the tremendous computer power is used to calculate the path of rays (radio waves) that hit the several cameras here on Earth back to their source, i.e. raytracing. If t...

The "Black Hole's Shadow" link ( https://www.esa.int/gsp/ACT/projects/blackhole_shadows.html ) has a visualization tool link near the bottom of the article. The tool is useless if you don't spend time learning to use it, BUT at the bottom of the Control Panel there is a "What is All T...

Ann - Thanks for the GALEX image link. I downloaded both the images and the names files.

Brian

Clicked on the image to get the larger version. Wow! Quite a few twinkling stars are easily seen. I was wondering how many actual stars are represented in the gif. M15 has over 100,000 stars according to one of the links. The gif has about 7 million pixels so a large number of actual stars could be ...