Starship Asterisk*

Chris Peterson wrote:

BobStein-VisiBone wrote:Huh, I do believe that's a mirror image.

Yes, it's mirrored vertically- north down, east left. Somewhat unfortunate, given that there was no good reason to break convention here, but it is what it is.

Thought you might have hopped 'round to the other side.

Huh, I do believe that's a mirror image.

To my eyes the reddish airglow appears to be "moving" in spurts. Not smooth motion as the stars and horizon. Illusion? Artifact? Or a real phenomenon?

MarkBour wrote:

BobStein-VisiBone wrote:...all those "artists renderings"....

I loved your 7th rendering image.

The best fake news would be simultaneously horrible, and so effing interesting, if it were true.

Really hoping we get to see a closeup of the actual rings, and to finally obsolete all those "artists renderings" we've had to put up with forever.

Found Waldo.

It is that time of year for all those mars-as-big-as-moon stories.

Sounds so ... 1985.

Maybe the announcement will be the discovery of a message from a sentient civilization that was encoded in the LIGO gravitational waves. Probabilistically, the message is most likely be "first post" or somebody complaining about something.

Thanks for the correction, Ann! So our protagonist is the pinkly-rendered star with diffraction lines just to the left of my crosshairs? How sure are you this is the source of the stellar winds that blew this bubble? There is some bright whitish (rendered) source of light at the tip of the yellowish...

...why is the bubble not centered on that star? Uneven interstellar resistance as it expanded? If so, why so beautifully circular? I wondered the same thing, heehaw. Thanks for noticing the real origin of the bubble is the whiter star, not the pink ones. I think maybe it's not so beautifully circul...

Can anyone tell me, why we don't see the moon in the photograph? As e.g. compared to here: http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/from-a-million-miles-away-nasa-camera-shows-moon-crossing-face-of-earth Thanks in advance Simon The Moon is still off to the left...and it is not an animation... :---[===] ...

Good visual, Ann! How about the Amniotic Nebula?

It's so nice to finally see a high resolution visual of Northern Plutopia, of the Aerican Empire.



All hail the Aerican Empire!

Aethopia → Aethiopia

Craig Willford wrote:...I would have expected the image to arrive first to be the center of the three, then the later ones to be the ones on the fringes, not the other way around.

Good point, Craig. Perhaps this implies the latest image was bent at least twice.

Where's the visual? The base image today appears identical to the APOD in March. APOD 2015 March 9 http://www.visibone.com/images/March.png APOD 2015 December 21 http://www.visibone.com/images/December.png The ESO image published November 25 appears to be the old one too. Ah, the Astronomer's Telegr...

...the benefits to society of the lunar missions... <<Tang ... was ... used ... on John Glenn's Mercury flight ... Buzz Aldrin stated that "Tang sucks". I agreed with Buzz... Zactly what I'm talking about. What beverage did the rovers give us that nobody likes? We need to fund a manned mi...

So just tallying up here, the benefits to society of the lunar missions were Teflon, CAT scans, ICs, LEDs, and solar energy.

And the Mars missions have given us the selfie stick.

From the last link in the article, to a page at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville: Dating of globular clusters by their turnoff points indicates that they may be as old as 15 billion years and are the oldest components of the galaxy. This implies that the galaxy itself is at least 15 billion ...

There are no cows in space. At least, there were none until a certain intrepid space-cowboy took a job... http://www.themarysue.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Cows-640x359.jpg#geekosystem Firefly episode "Shindig". Oh yea um, spoiler alert. And then seriously, there are no cows in space: h...

I'm with Guest and zeck and Chris in preferring the un- er less-doctored version. This is more compelling to me:

How about water-ice deposits from colliding comets? So instead of a dirty snowball, it's a snowy dirtball.

DavidGovett wrote:Will humans ever be able to terraform proto solar systems?

The proto part seems foolhardy. Wouldn't that be like building homes in an active volcano's lava path? Or beach houses in an era of rising sea level? Oh wait.

APOD Robot wrote:...craters might ... be filled in whenever the asteroid gets ... struck by a massive meteor.

So what you're saying is, Asteroid Itokawa might show evidence of a crater after all. One that is bigger than Asteroid Itokawa.