Starship Asterisk*

a rock among many.

I'm actually with Holger on this one. This is not a matter of enhancing details normally invisible to the eye. It's a matter of adding something that was NOT THERE. One can't track the sky without smudging the land; one can't get the moonlit peaks without both underexposing and washing out the deep...

Physicists are so different from astrophysicists, though, not just generally in human personalities, but also in the way math and models are handled. We all have to make fun of ourselves, sometimes.

Deactivated account for spamming the board to achieve the 100 post rank. Don't do that.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Well, I'm still alive, aren't I?

yeah, I bet you are genuinely interested and not just here to put sneaky advertising/spam links in the forum to increase the search engine rankings for the company that hired you

Thanks, owlice! Yeah, it was a lot of fun to work on this.

I took a frantic drive out to a spot 80 miles WSW of Moab to 'greet the visitor'. Any Kubrick/2001 fan would be mesmerized by this thing sprouting up 17 miles down a bumpy dirt road near the Needles District of Canyonlands National Park. 25 hours door-to-door, including 6.5 hours of shooting. Tried...

I have a question: in galaxy pictures with this kind of resolution, can we see their globular clusters and if so, how do I tell one from a dimmer foreground star from our galaxy? You can see them, and they look a lot softer than a MW star and lack diffraction spikes. They'll usually be lumpy, too. ...

Where the diffraction spikes on foreground stars enhanced on this image? They look really strong when compared to this Hubble photo of NGC 5643 at Wikipedia: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/91/NGC_5643.png Just new and multiple sets of data used. The telescope nearly always points ...

what kind of computer do you have that won't let you delete images?

That's cool... Pat and I were down in Carmel-by-the-Sea earlier this year in the Before Times and were trying to find a statue or some art that suits us. Turns out that taste diminishes with multiples of thousands of dollars, though.

Art, I need you to know that I have to put on my headphones to hear anything, and I am not going to needlessly expend such energy for a video that clearly contains the current potus in it. lol

Is that a sculpture out behind your greenhouse, Chris?

Smoke haze is by far the worst weather I've had to endure. Here in Modesto it's been a solid few weeks with little relief. I used to think that constant cold, wet, grey weather was the worst, but I'd take that in a heartbeat right now.

ps that's me trying to say "go easy on whoever made this image they did the best they could with what they had"

fwiw there isn't complete coverage over the entire image with wideband filters to portray accurate star colors relative to one another from the top half to the bottom half. Only the narrowband data cover the whole image. this is just based on me looking at the footprints in the archive search result...

happy with how this one turned out, posting to share with y'all:

NGC 2336 by Judy Schmidt, on Flickr

Thanks to Hubble and to geckzilla for processing this image. I don't think this image is geckzilla's. Her image on flickr of NGC 6814 doesn't really look like this. That's strange. Today's APOD image clearly gives an acknowledgement to Judy Schmidt (aka geckzilla) in the lower left corner, and so d...

I don't think it was a request to add a new forum section.

Huh, this galaxy has a common name: The Meathook. Guess it's too evocative for APOD.

I mean, yeah, your post wasn't political, Zuke. Discussing language is cool, and I wish we had a better relationship with China. Heck, my spouse is Chinese, if that tells you much. Anyway, carry on.

Removed two posts discussing politics from the thread. Discussing politics in the forum is against the rules.

Feared and revered, haha, good one, Bruce. Maybe reviled or at least mildly disliked. FWIW I took exception to "arachnologically" because I thought they were more separated than that, but I mean, the first line in Wikipedia says they're arachnids. Plus, I made a similar mistake a while ago...