Starship Asterisk*

The long crawl toward credibility for female scientists. From what I've heard from a couple different JPL scientists (and their wives that accompany them to conferences) the vaunted ranks of distinguished scientists are liberally peppered with chauvinists who still think science is for men only. A r...

Rocketship XM was filmed just the other side of those hills in the Southwest.

keeper of the faith wrote:You can easily see this is not the Moon for yourself. All you need to do is go out and look at the real Moon. Looks nothing like this.

Keeper of what faith ?

I've also read that Andromeda is actually huge in our sky, but it is dim because of "low surface brightness". Does that mean dust is hiding it, in optical wavelengths, from human eyes ? It doesn't have particularly low surface brightness. It's a fairly typical spiral galaxy, quite like ou...

Andromeda and the Milky Way are on a collision course, and I've heard that at least 11 other galaxies are getting closer to us as well, though perhaps not on collision courses themselves. I've also read that Andromeda is actually huge in our sky, but it is dim because of "low surface brightness...

Why does the Southern Hemisphere get all the best comet action ? ?

Hello, I'm new to the APOD registry although by no means new to the site. I'm going by Pianosorplanets if anyone cares to address me. I've also left an introduction in the intro area (http://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php?p=245779#p245779). I have a burning question about the New Horizon mission a...

But if we're still addicted to "The Kardashians" and cat videos even as we hit the Fold Space button, we're nothing BUT trouble. Hey now, you leave the cat videos out of this. They've done nothing but good things! Good! Cats are good people. I have to admit you might have a point. Larry N...

If an alien civilization wanted to pick a good place to leave a calling card one of the last sizable bodies within a solar system might be a good spot. I think Clarke was correct in selecting the Moon for that purpose. After all, the huge leap is to the Moon; after that, everything else is pretty u...

VERY interesting. And Thank You.

Question : With a 248 yr orbit, a portion of which is interior to Neptune's, where is Pluto now, during this encounter, within that orbit ? We have launch windows for most planets (e.g. Mars' window is every two years), so was NH on a schedule to catch Pluto at its closest approach to the Sun , or d...

I don't feel small ; I feel calibrated. That's a pretty good way of putting it. I agree. But I feel more than calibrated. I feel pretty awesome. It took the universe to make me and the rest of humanity. Isn't that something? Ann I feel awesome about it all, too. I'm not going to let some postulated...

A lot of people don't like to hear talk about how humans are "but moments of light, fading in the grass" (as the Youngbloods put it), but reading this caption and looking at a picture of colliding galaxies, IMHO, puts me in a perspective that does not constitute an insult or condescending ...

How do humans reproduce in zero G conditions when " swimming upstream " does not compute ? Good question. I would think gravity is a major part of the survival of the fittest process, and zero gee will level the playing field in interesting ways. Immediately following the festivities, it ...

IMHO, that cow spacesuit is missing a LOT of processing equipment towards the rear end. Probably not shown for security reasons. PLUS - cows don't need no stinkin' NASA, as shown below :

When our Earthly view of a galaxy is at an oblique angle, is it true that we're seeing the far edge as it was tens of thousands of years before the light we're getting from the near edge ? Easy to think we're looking at the entire galaxy as it was 50 million years ago, but is there a temporal gradie...

Constellations will all change over time, but I wonder if anyone has figured out what they'd all look like from somewhere else besides Earth, such as the Kuiper belt, or Alpha Centauri. Yes, if by "constellations" you are referring to the primary asterisms we associate with them. From the...

Constellations will all change over time, but I wonder if anyone has figured out what they'd all look like from somewhere
else besides Earth, such as the Kuiper belt, or Alpha Centauri. I wonder how many of the distances to the stars comprising the 88 constellations are known.

Isn't this image kind of unprecedented ? I've seen tiny, fuzzy photos described as possible nascent star systems before, but, at 450 light years distant, and using a ground-based observatory, this is an image of amazing detail. Does the Hubble have the instruments to capture a similar image from spa...

Sometimes, rather than just go ahead and dive into details and discussions, I am moved to step back and just marvel at the age of wonders we live in. No, I'm not wrapped in some naive space picture bubble of rapture, but despite everything wrong with early 21st century Earth, there are some things t...

No problems, nitpicker. The discussions here are too unique in my simple life. I do get jazzed up, though I don't always feel the need to comment, because I may realize I have nothing to add, though the subject matter fascinates me. I often also realize that the insights here are my last stop before...

Intuition is a fine thing to use as an aid to analysis. But don't forget about the analysis. And according to this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Mars The atmospheric pressure on top of Olympus Mons (0.03 kPa) is only a twentieth of the Mars average, whereas on top of Mount Eve...

OKAY Thanks for saying SOMEthing. I'm only 17 posts into this forum, and I know they can get cliquish at times, or maybe I said something in one of those posts that didn't go down well, or whatever. I have read so many abstract and scholarly posts around here, that I thought perhaps someone had some...

Something you don't hear much discussion of is the way the roughly half-gee gravity on Mars affects Earth-based human intuitions about processes there. Everyone seems caught up in the Moab-type desert terrain and water effect analogies. I once thought that standing on the summit of Olympus Mons wou...

Something you don't hear much discussion of is the way the roughly half-gee gravity on Mars affects Earth-based human intuitions about processes there. Everyone seems caught up in the Moab-type desert terrain and water effect analogies. I once thought that standing on the summit of Olympus Mons woul...