Starship Asterisk*

My immediate reaction to today's apod was, "why would anybody want to take a picture of some idiot aiming a laser pointer at the Moon?" After reading the caption I can see that it's one hell of a laser pointer. Certain members of my astronomy club would give their left arm to get a laser ...

My immediate reaction to today's apod was, "why would anybody want to take a picture of some idiot aiming a laser pointer at the Moon?" After reading the caption I can see that it's one hell of a laser pointer. Certain members of my astronomy club would give their left arm to get a laser p...

Around 270 BC, the Greek astronomer Aristarchus also measured the duration of lunar eclipses - though probably without the benefit of digital clocks and cameras. information like that never ceases to amaze me. Probably. Probably? Really? Is there a possibility that Aristarchus had a digital clock? ...

And by the way, this is a breathtakingly beautiful image! Thank you Mr. Takasaka!

Around 270 BC, the Greek astronomer Aristarchus also measured the duration of lunar eclipses - though probably without the benefit of digital clocks and cameras. information like that never ceases to amaze me. Recently I've been imagining a 24-hour analog clock that displays: sidereal time by rotat...

Lovely photo - shame it's been spoilt by a silly white border someone's seen fit to add... I don't know if that is an aesthetic preference, or what. But I have noticed with my un-bordered astro images, if they are displayed on some monitors in a window with a white background -- especially if a dar...

I too had envisioned capturing a similar picture of Mars, Spica and the totally-eclipsed moon on the morning of 2014 Apr 15, but alas, inclement weather precluded it. Here in southern New Jersey, there were broken clouds during the penumbral stage, so I saw some slight darkening around 1:30 am EDT ...

What a lovely picture! Through the telescope, fifth magnitude h Virginis, seen here just above the Moon, was a lovely companion to the eclipsed Moon. And here in California Mars appeared beside the Moon, rather than below her.

I can hardly wait for October 8.

The sky appears blue on Earth when looking out into space in the daytime, not inward, no? The sky scatters the same amount of blue upwards as it does down. It's just that when you're looking up, there's nothing behind the sky to interfere. You can see that the sky is blue in many images made lookin...

neufer wrote:http://www.planetary.org/blogs/guest-bl ... pdate.html

Thanks Art, very informative. It sounds like these craft don't have any optical wavelength instruments to take pictures of the Earth eclipsing the Sun.

Wow, that's a beautiful image. I've been looking at Mars through small telescopes (100 mm to 200 mm aperture) for the past few months, and occasionally I've been able to make out the north polar ice cap and see some broad albedo features, but nothing like the detail and definition seen in this stack...

NGC3314 wrote:Niven's inimitable short form:

East takes you Out, Out takes you West, West takes you In, In takes you East.

(This applies to definitions such that orbits go west-to-east, as almost all Earth satellites and large solar system objects do).

Oh, that's brilliant. I've got my koan for the day.

Thanks for the clarification. I still would not call an 18th magnitude object very bright. I don't take pictures, but I can't imagine that imaging an asteroid 50 times fainter than Pluto would be a trivial undertaking. Charilko is currently in Scorpio, transiting during astronomical dawn. Could you...

At an apparent magnitude of just over +1, and being the 15th brightest star in the night sky. Spica is clearly Naked Eye visible Thank you for that. I feel like an accomplished star gazer now!! :D :D Spica will now hold a very treasured spot in my newborn star gazing career. Outside of the little d...

This is a lovely picture, and a very exciting astronomical conjunction! I've been watching Vesta and Ceres in 56 mm binoculars for the past few weeks. At 6th magnitude Vesta is easy to identify even in my light polluted city. Ceres has brightened from 8th to 7th magnitude, but is still tough to pick...

... (and at 18 magnitude, the object is very bright, easily captured by small amateur telescopes, though not resolved by them) ... . Chris, your ideas of "very bright" and "small amateur telescopes" are very different from mine! Or maybe everything is different at 3000 meters el...

This illustration shows Chariklo as roughly spherical. Would an asteroid of 250 km diameter be able to pull itself into a spherical shape? Would that make Chariklo a dwarf planet?

... (and at 18 magnitude, the object is very bright, easily captured by small amateur telescopes, though not resolved by them) ... . Chris, your ideas of "very bright" and "small amateur telescopes" are very different from mine! Or maybe everything is different at 3000 meters el...

One personal gripe (apart from the colours of the processed image) is that as I like to use links in the explanation to APODs I did find the 27 links in the explanation to this APOD were far too many, such that I gave up on using many of them. There has been a tendency for quite some time now to in...

True enough. It is rather hackneyed. A lot of people do seem to like pictures with extreme colors and high contrast. These things attract attention. Also, I could just be an elitist jerk... maybe I need to lighten up. An image like this, by itself, is not very representative of the object. This sor...

The closest I've seen is the view from geosynchronous weather satellites, but a geosynchronous satellite is always looking at the same terrestrial longitude, and they're too close to Earth to show the full ring of sunsets and sunrises during a lunar eclipse. Just for reference, at the surface of th...

Art Neuendorffer ("anti-S a t u r(atfordia)n") Okay Art. What's the connection between Saturn and whether or not the writings of Shakespeare were written by William Shakespeare of Stratford? What do you have up your sleeve? http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5c/Marlowe.jpg --...

I would love it if somebody would put a camera right in the middle of the Earth-facing side of the Moon (the highlands north of Albategnius, perhaps) transmitting a live video feed of the Earth. Tune in to the Moon-Earth channel and you could watch the continents and oceans rotating in and out of v...

The image was brought up through the "Pictured above" link where in its caption it stated the image was "a full-disk view of the anti-Saturn hemisphere on Enceladus". I take the "anti-Saturn" to mean the image shows a side of Enceladus that is not facing Saturn but doe...

I would love it if somebody would put a camera right in the middle of the Earth-facing side of the Moon (the highlands north of Albategnius, perhaps) transmitting a live video feed of the Earth. Tune in to the Moon-Earth channel and you could watch the continents and oceans rotating in and out of vi...