Starship Asterisk*

Subjective Question: Diffraction spikes -- do they add to or detract from images like this, and in which ways? Practically, I think they help boost the prominence of the brightest stars in a medium with insufficient dynamic range to record their true brightness. Aesthetically, I think they enhance ...

I presume the diffraction spikes were added for artistic effect. It seems incongruent that all of the stars have tracking motion but the diffraction spikes are clear and crisp. :idea: I sensed something incongruous about the tracking artifacts/star trails of the dimmer stars vs. the brightest stars...

Is the lack of a corona in this pic due to the exposure, or is it because this is a very minimum maximum (if u c what I mean !) Two words: “dynamic range.” Briefly, it’s the exposure, although that isn’t the whole story. The range of brightness of the corona far exceeds the range of photographic me...

Partial eclipse rained out for me.

Perhaps they still believed that comets were scary omens back in 1680. No doubt. This was a few years before Isaac Newton published his Principia, and the idea that the heavens obeyed the same natural laws as the Earth was still a radical notion. Edmund Halley did not establish comets as law-abidin...

Are those diffraction rings around the occulting disc? I never noticed those before.

My accent is a mix of St. Thomas, north-central Florida, and Boston. After taking an on-line test, I was declared to be from Philadelphia.

One thing about this thread: it's fun to read!

geckzilla wrote:The gamut diagram always bothered me because it's subject to whatever gamut limitation of the medium it's presented on.

Quite true.

I'm going to offer a nitpick, however, and say that this picturre does not, in fact, show us all the colors of the Sun. The color violet is missing. The violet color can clearly be seen in this picture of a rainbow , so presumably violet is a real color of the Sun. Another color which is there in t...

Why have I never, ever, ever seen Princess Andromeda depicted as an Ethiopian?

My dear friend Bubbles made this analemma that tracks the Sun through the tropical zodiac ( e.g. the September equinox is the beginning of Libra ). The sun's position at today's equinox (Sept 22, 2013) is in Virgo, about 38 degrees west of the modern Libra border. It looks like your friend is using...

equi - nox -- Equal Night. it doesn't say approximately equal night. aproxaequinox might. It says equal. eleven minutes is more than 1/6th of an hour. try holding your breath for eleven minutes if you think that's a short time. Or try waiting at gun point by a mugger for eleven minutes waiting for ...

Having the dark side of the Moon appear darker than the surrounding sky is distracting. It makes the Moon look as if it's in front of the clouds.

It seems to me that artistic license was stretched to the breaking point in this composite.

geckzilla wrote:"...I thought there was just Russia in that spot."

In a sense, it was. Kazakhstan was part of the Soviet Union, which was the successor to the Russian Empire.

BTW, the Milky Way only looks linear to most people when it is high overhead. When it is lower it is obviously not parallel to the horizon, and our brains tend to treat the horizon as a straight line (although it doesn't project as a straight line on our retinas). Photoshop ain't got nothing on the...

The Flying Squirrel Nebula—that was my immediate impression.

(It also looks like a pillow with an unusually large tag not to be removed under penalty of law.)