Starship Asterisk*

Do you coordinate with the EPOD picture and switch from time to time? Their photo today is of the Milky Way over the Atacama Desert.

(But I also love mammatus clouds. I took a picture of some outside my house once, although they weren't so well-defined as these.)

I keep hoping that one of the space agencies will announce a mission to Neptune and/or Uranus. They're the only planets that haven't had a dedicated mission and there's so much out there that we need to know more about. Heck, a moon is getting a dedicated mission ahead of Neptune and Uranus.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/2107/RingColorsOH_Vanderbei_1080.jpg Very nice! The picture readily explains why planetary nebulas may look green, cyan or blue to the human eye, but never red. Colors of planetary nebulas annotated.png Planetary nebulas basically emit just two wavelengths of visibl...

I found it, although I have to admit that I had to read the description to see what I was looking for before I did. As soon as I read that I was looking for an eclipsed Moon, I scrolled back up and saw it immediately. I was also surprised by how large the disc was in the image. I was thinking it was...

And at high resolution, the face doesn't look like a face at all (courtesy of NASA):

I wonder how different Western history would have been had Andromeda been easily visible in the sky when the Roman Catholic Church decided that the whole of creation orbited the Earth. It would have been obvious that Andromeda was a system all of itself. I'm not sure that follows. Even in the early...

That was amazing... but I'd be okay with not seeing that storm coming at me.

We're getting a bit too much sun out here. Perhaps he could push the button again and dim the light a bit?

Why is "duct tape" in scare quotes? I mean, that's the actual name of the stuff. And while I appreciate the adaptability of the astronauts in their unusual environment, "ingenious" might be a bit of an overstatement here. Not like I haven't seen plenty of temporarily repaired fe...

Whenever I see pictures of the lunar soil, I always think of a novel by Arthur C. Clarke called "A Fall of Moondust", written in 1961, before any of the Moon landings. How nice for the astronauts that the dust isn't like it was in that novel. It's still a problem, but they're not going to ...

Beautiful. All we had were clouds. Beautifully clear this morning, of course.

I don't even like cats and I think that's darling.

But thanks for finding the unannotated. It's a beautiful image.

This is the first non-planet that I found in a telescope on my own. It remains one of my favorites. Globular clusters are so beautiful and so interesting. Imagine how bright the night sky would be if we lived in one of them.

I will gush a bit. I love the details that come out in these mapped color images. I know they're not the real colors, but all the ridges and beautiful patterns of the nebulae are so much more obvious in these. I love the other ones, too, but I'm not too picky on my astronomy pics. There's more to i...

I will gush a bit. I love the details that come out in these mapped color images. I know they're not the real colors, but all the ridges and beautiful patterns of the nebulae are so much more obvious in these.

I love the other ones, too, but I'm not too picky on my astronomy pics.

It's too big to be a space station!

That's an excellent video, and I appreciate that they anticipated my own questions about the distorted secondary image I was noticing during the orbit. I think I've found another video to show my astronomy class. :) The first book I read on black holes was back in the 90s in my high school library. ...

It looks like the Stargate fell over! This QM stuff is so fascinating to me. My study of physics didn't get beyond introductory modern physics, but I have a stack of books on QM that are waiting for me to get to them. (After I read my book on the women of the Harvard Observatory at the beginning of ...

Beautiful. That's my favorite star cluster (and I love seeing it as Ann's avatar, too ).

That was beautiful, and I really appreciate the helpful arrows. I lost track a couple of times.

This is weirdly entertaining. I have so many questions now. Are spacesuits so ubiquitous that they can just jettison one for fun? Or did they intentionally bring along an extra spacesuit? Did they get in trouble for doing it? Did they sneak some vodka onto the ISS and were just drunk? And finally......

Learning about the Antikythera mechanism is what initially pushed me into studying the history of science. It's amazing, in part because it represents a height of engineering that was lost a century or two later. The general impression many people get is that science is always progressing, but ther...

Learning about the Antikythera mechanism is what initially pushed me into studying the history of science. It's amazing, in part because it represents a height of engineering that was lost a century or two later. The general impression many people get is that science is always progressing, but there...

That is an absolutely gorgeous picture today. The colors are beautiful and I love all the details that can be seen in the nebula.

I'm excited to see the chopper fly...or at least to see pictures the chopper takes when it flies.

Hopefully, it turns out better than the Interplanetary Cessna. (Source: https://what-if.xkcd.com/30/)