Starship Asterisk*

The pelican has always been obvious to me. Maybe because I grew up around pelicans?

Today’s APOD is mirror-reversed.

Calling them “Starships” seems about as honest as calling a high tech skateboard a “Hoverboard.”

johnnydeep wrote: ↑Fri Jan 29, 2021 3:27 pm Ok, I see North America clearly in the lighter nebula (NGC 7000), but where the heck is the pelican in IC 5070?

This is what I see:

Have you ever seen the Southern Cross? Every spring, but never in that position, except the time I visited South Africa. I did visit southern Chile once, but it was late spring, and I was never awake when the Sun was down. It may have been on a trip to Bolivia when I realized that I took the Southe...

SuperStargazerScott wrote: ↑Thu Jan 21, 2021 5:46 am Isn't that image upside down?

There is no such thing as upside down in astrophotography. But chirality is a thing, and this photo appears to be mirror-reversed.

The photo’s orientation can be found in the copyright link to the photographer.

Chris Peterson wrote: ↑Mon Jan 18, 2021 9:12 pm

Mountainjim62 wrote: ↑Mon Jan 18, 2021 7:59 pm Ever notice the that people who go out of there way to prove their intelligence...

Hmmm.

Muphry’s law will not be mocked! —Skitt

Does anyone know why the oxygen (blue) is concentrated toward the lower left? We aren't necessarily seeing more oxygen in that region. We could simply be seeing it because that's where it is most strongly ionized, which would be a consequence of the distribution of hot stars that provide the ionizi...

I get this message for your image: Sorry, our service is currently not available in your region If Chris could see it, I suspect it’s because Chris and the website are both in Colorado. I suspect the problem is on your end. I'm not in Colorado and I can see it. I suspect the problem is in those dam...

Does anyone know why the oxygen (blue) is concentrated toward the lower left?

Oh boy, I'm still finding this "the moon is a dark as asphalt" fact very hard to fathom, now even more so after you mentioning the moon in daytime. Here's a typical(?) picture of how I remember the moon appearing in daylight, in a blue sky: https://theknow.denverpost.com/wp-content/upload...

Whoa there! So, are you saying that if the moon were entirely paved over with a layer of freshly laid black asphalt, a full moon would look as bright to us as it currently does? If so, that might be the most surprising thing I've heard about space in a long long time! But, since the maria and non-m...

I had to dodge some clouds, which somehow materialized just as I finished aligning the finder scope, but I caught the Great Conjunction this evening at 133 power. Naked eye, it wasn’t all that impressive; the 1999 conjunction of Jupiter and Venus looked much more dramatic and freaked out a lot of pe...

I’m glad someone got to see this one in person.

MoonSmith wrote: ↑Thu Nov 26, 2020 4:01 pm For someone who just looks at and reads APOD for pleasure and is astronomically challenged, is this a faked image ala April 1st?
Thanks!

It’s a fake that was constructed from real image data. Here is the undoctored nebula.

Lastly, the Virgin Islands Basin is an extensional basin which lies at the south-western end of the Anegada Trough, a feature that was explored in 2013 and 2014 by the E/V Nautilus. Together the Muertos Trough, the Mona Canyon, the Virgin Islands Basin/Anegada Trough, and the Puerto Rico Trench, de...

XgeoX wrote: ↑Wed Dec 09, 2020 8:38 am Dollars to doughnuts that it was hidden corrosion that did it in. A tropical, humid climate is hell on machines and maintenance must be diligent.

Some suspect the swarm of earthquakes 50 km to the south at the beginning of this year may have contributed.

How was this allowed to happen?? I don't understand the political position of Puerto Rico, it's a 'territory' (not a state) of the US! But part of the US, not some poverty-stricken third world country! And the US allows a prime astronomy instrument to fall apart? What??? You speak as if the USA isn...

And here I was, trying to figure out M43 before I read the description. (I gave up and figured it was in infrared.)

My sister saw this launch from her home more than 200 km away.

My sisters are in town, freshly tested negative, so we got together for some planet gazing. I showed them Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn at 200 power. As a nice surprise, we got to see some movement of the Galilean satellites—Io had moved out from behind Jupiter. I was able to make out a broad stripe acr...

Would gravity decrease time by accelerating car toward sun? The calculation is based on traveling at a constant speed. If you want to allow for the effects of gravity, you have to design some kind of ballistic path, in which case the calculation of travel time becomes more complex. Even more comple...

RJN wrote: ↑Tue Sep 29, 2020 12:42 pm

aljo wrote: ↑Tue Sep 29, 2020 8:59 am Titled? As in Duke, Earl, Viscount etc.?

Yes, thank you. That typo has now been fixed (Titled --> Tilted). I apologize for the oversight.
- RJN

The YouTube video (as of 10:00 a.m. EDT) has the same typo.

This kinds of artificial photoshopped images would never be needed if every single astro photo comes with an angular scale. The reason they don't is to accommodate people's revulsion to number, and people's laziness from making their own comparison. It’s more than that. Our brains are just more wir...

Looking at the equinox sunset angle, it dawned on me that Edmonton is some serious north! I looked up some stats, and it turns out that Edmonton is farther north than London, UK, and is as far north as Punta Arenas, Chile is south. I once visited Punta Arenas a month prior to the summer solstice, an...

Keep in mind that this is a pseudocolor image. That is, it is a grayscale raw image which is presented here with the different intensities mapped to different colors. The colors here have no relationship to actual color of the objects. I was going to ask about that! Thanks for anticipating my quest...