Starship Asterisk*

I was impressed when the description said that NGC 7380 is located "only" 8,000 light years away! That got me wondering how farther away is the Horsehead Nebula? Wikipedia states that the Horsehead is some 1,500 light years away. So that means the Horsehead is virtually in our neighborhood...

I am again amazed at what kind of science laws is involved here. This still photograph is some sort of time lapse photography whereas the so called "immovable" stars are seen to move over some sort of distance because the Earth rotates, yet for the same time period the Moon doesn't budge o...

I believe the green color is also caused by photo processing. Different transistor circuits can produce different shades of color. I notice that when shopping for TV monitors in electronic stores. Different manufacturer sets show different shades of color, particularly red, even though the store is ...

If I may offer my not very scientific based theory. Perhaps the Wolf half side of the Wolf-Rayet star is facing the bright nebula. As you may know wolves are strong howlers so they likely produces strong howling solar winds. The Rayet side of the star like in the Russian language can be Nyet, Nyet i...

Could we not use the mars helicopter to fly over and clear the panels of dust ? I doubt it. The Mars helicopter is associated with the Perseverance rover which is several hundreds of miles away from Insight. As of today the helicopter has logged some 5 miles of flight distance! Ironically the Curio...

OOh that's spooky! Just out of curiosity, concerning the names of nebulae, does the letter D in LDN 43 means Dark Nebula, and the B in LBN 7 means Bright Nebula?

Sunset is the best time to see a partial Solar Eclipse. I like that you don't have to buy number 8 or 10 welder's glass to see it without going blind.

Something confusing again. The Wikipedia link for NGC 1300 says this, "The galaxy is about 110,000 light-years across (about the half size of the Milky Way at 200,000)." Yet several websites such as space. com say that the Milky Way's diameter is about 100,000 ly across. So what is the tru...

I find it interesting how the mega large universe mimics the micro world we know. At first I thought the Apod alternating red lights reminds me of the red flashing lights at a train crossing. And then the description of the long track at left is a gamma train along our Milky Way Galaxy. Except this ...

According to my almanac, northern autumnal equinox occurred on September 23rd, so I guess that would make the October full moon the first after this event? That's true. What I think happened here is a simple mistake. I suppose the headline writer looked up the date of the Harvest Moon and on the ti...

I don't get it. The description says that the Moon returns to the same position in the sky 50 minutes and 29 later every day. So photographing it in that time table every day should result in a single image of many composite photos. Yet the Moon is in different positions in the sky. Once it is almos...

Sometimes the physics of astronomy simply astonishes you. I am referring to a comment by Ann that Jupiter once moved inward in the solar system to 1.5 AU, but then was pulled out by Saturn to its present position. That is even though the mass of Jupiter is over 3 times the mass of Saturn! It defies ...

We are told of the galaxy's yellowish core, dark dust clouds, bright blue star clusters, and red star forming regions are easy to spot.But what are the little green spots? You can see them best in the expanded large image. There is a green spot about a third way up the tail, and another green spot i...

Something puzzles me about time-lapse videos. I used to think that time speeds up in time-lapse. Say a year passes by in a couple of minutes in the video. But here in NASA's page under Dimorphos they state that Dart impacted the satellite at a speed of 6.6 kilometers a second. Then they state that t...

This raises the question, Is the Adriatic Sea just another name for the Mediterranean Sea? Likewise is the Gulf of Mexico just a part of the Atlantic Ocean?. If you were to say to a resident of the Gulf Coast of Florida that you are on an Atlantic beach you'd be run out of town! It is the Gulf beach...

Orin Stepanek wrote, "I thought this photo showed up before." Yup, searching APOD for Horsehead In Infrared Hubble, I found 3 entries before, on Apr 12 2020, June 8 2016, and April 22 2013. I stopped scrolling at that point. But today's version seems to be processed more longer. The reds a...

The write-up says that this contains data from the JWST. Is that correct, and if so, what did the JWST contribute? Here is the JWST contribution. It appears to have focused on the blue star cluster region near the center which they say is "only" 340 light years across. https://www.nasa.go...

With regard to number 1, Venus being flipped over by "the inner planets .. most certainly underwent dramatic spin-altering collisions" as stated in the description, I remember an essay by Issac Asimov where he stated, if Venus suffered a monumental collision, then what imaginably incredibl...

Wow in all my 60 years I have never seen a cloud like that before! (And as an old farmer I am out in the fields all day long.) If it wasn't for the color in the Pileus cloud I might think it resembles a mushroom cloud. (Thankfully I have never seen a mushroom cloud - in reality - either.)

"Every step caused the sand to light up blue." What does this mean exactly?? When bioluminescent microorganisms are present in the water, walking on wet sand at the water's edge can leave glowing footprints behind. Hmm, that probably explains why the western state of Oregon. particularly ...

A couple of questions. I read that the JWT can't detect blue visible color, being an infrared camera. So that means that the blue auroras aren't actually a blue color. Does blue mean that it a colder infrared which would make sense since the poles would be colder than the equator. But why is there a...

Nice going, China. Speaking of orbiting the Moon, I read on a news site a few days ago that sometime this week or next there is going to be a rocket by NASA or ESA called Artemis 1 launched to the Moon. The first rocket that can carry astronauts to the Moon since Apollo 17, although Artemis 1 will b...

I can see 3 colors besides the white. The blue is obvious. What they call purple I would think is the color that looks more precisely like lavender. And the red looks more like a burgundy color. Am I wrong?

Yup that's from the JWST alright. I've noticed you can tell there are 6 star spikes whereas older telescopes like Hubble only show 4 star spikes. The picture is the NGC 7469 galaxy. But I like the Hubble picture of NGC 7469 better. It looks more detailed for a poster. Although the infrared is scient...

My opinion they picked and chose the exposures to get the meteors to look parallel. Here is their explanation from the Facebook link which I used a translator to translate into English; 1h30 ago for the sky with the canon 6d in exposures of 180s there are also 50 hours to capture the maximum number ...