Starship Asterisk*

It would have been nice if this particular picture had been annotated +1 I was thinking the same thing. (role the cursor over the image and up pops the annotation. I started doing an annotated version, but I regret that I just don't have the time to do it properly. There are so many objects to labe...

I haven't seen any comments regarding the background star field yet, but a couple of reference points to get started are revealed in the spoiler. Arcturus is the bright star to the left of the "ghost" and the stick figure of Leo is about at the same height, with the Sickle near the right e...

I didn't find any bad links either.

The only time you can "see" a truly full moon is during a central lunar eclipse, where the center of the moon passes through the center of the earth's shadow. This is about the closest you can get and still have the moon visible. In principle there should be a very slender shaded sector o...

Unless I missed it, and my apologies if I did, nobody has mentioned the identity of the background stars so far. The first thing that jumped out at me was the Water Jar of Aquarius. It's the triangle of stars, with a fourth star at the middle, near the right-hand edge above the clouds. Towards the u...

What are the two faint stars near the Moon, one below it and one to the upper left of it? The star below the moon is Rho Leonis, magnitude 3.9. The star above-left of the moon is 48 Leonis, magnitude 4.9. I figure the picture was taken about 7:15 pm local standard time (UT-4), approximately one hou...

Visible with binoculars... And to the naked eye under good observing conditions. The featured image in HDR , taken through a small telescope... A kind of marginal usage of "HDR". This is just a stacked astronomical image. Yes -- I've seen M13 many times with unaided eyes, even here in the...

Unfortunately, my mouse cursor was over the picture when the page opened, so the label for 252P was one of the first things I saw. I would have liked to have searched for it -- oh well. Regardless, based on the position of 252P, the picture was taken on the morning of 03-April-2016, several days bef...

Visually in a modest amateur telescope without any filters (e.g., my 12.5-inch Newtonian), the Cat's Eye Nebula has a pale blue-green color, which is not unusual for planetary nebulae. It also shows the "blinking" effect when magnified, similar to the Blinking Planetary, NGC 6826 in Cygnus...

As with many APOD's the high resolution version reveals a great amount of detail. However, some detail is lacking in the wavelengths used for this image. For example, stars are generally weak, so the mini-Orion asterism off the Gulf of Mexico in the North America Nebula, which shows nicely in a pre...

It's a fine picture as far as it goes, but the framing is irksome. Both the Helix and Comet C/2013 X1 (PANSTARRS) are crammed into the corners, and even part of the comet's dust tail is chopped off. The primary subjects of the picture need some breathing room around them! Besides the too-small field...

Based on the position of Mars (and Saturn too), this picture was taken on the night of May 1, 2016 — indeed, it's early May as described. Looking at the larger version you get by clicking the picture on the main page, you can also see a small, slightly greenish patch in northern Ophiuchus representi...

I was amazed when I saw this image, and the video, of the ISS transit during the Mercury transit, quite an uncommon combination. Then I was really amazed when I saw it was taken from Philadelphia, a short hop from my home in the New Jersey suburbs of Philly. So I checked Cal-Sky to see the path of v...

Mercury's disc covers ~4 parts in 100 000 of the sun's disc from Earth's ' close up view ' but it only covers ~1 part in 100 000 of the sun's disc from 40 light years out. The sun is 695,700 km radius and Mercury is 2,939.7 km radius per Wikipedia, so the sun would present 56,006 times the area of ...

Mercury's disc covers ~4 parts in 100 000 of the sun's disc from Earth's ' close up view ' but it only covers ~1 part in 100 000 of the sun's disc from 40 light years out. Given that during the transit, Mercury was 12.0 arc seconds in diameter and the sun was 1900.8 arc seconds in diameter as viewe...

I've never seen a Mercury transit. The past three were obscured by clouds in my area. Despite a lot a of cloudy/rainy weather recently, the forecast for tomorrow looks good through the early afternoon, so keeping my fingers crossed, I'll have a chance to see much of it. In my area at 40°N-75°W, sunr...

Reversing the stakes, what is the angular diameter of the Sun for an imaginary Mercurian observer? For the upcoming transit on May 9th, the sun will have an apparent diameter (from earth) of 0.528 degrees. The earth will be 1.009 au from the Sun and Mercury will be 0.446 au from the sun. Therefore,...

Omega Centauri is one of the most spectacular objects in the sky for the visual astronomer. Make an effort to view it, even if all you have are binoculars. It is worth the effort! I agree with you entirely, except not everyone is geographically located in a favorable position to do so. Omega Centau...

The time given in the Exif data also confused me as the explanation (and in the caption to the image brought up through the 'the dreamlike scene' link) it states "A waning crescent moon, the emerging morning twilight" so thus not p.m. I find it adds interest to know at least the local dat...

Nice shot. Tafreshi must have a big lens and a high megapixel camera to keep the moon overexposure from making a big nasty blob. I would submit the moon actually is quite a blob in this picture. It's impossible to tell from the picture itself that it was a crescent, let alone which way the crescent...

I took some pictures of the Crescent Moon and Mercury on the evening of same date... Oh, I think your photo is rather fine in a bucolic kind of way. I don't believe I have actually ever seen the planet Mercury in Terrestrial skies, being that I live in a rather light-polluted suburb of a major U. S...

I took some pictures of the Crescent Moon and Mercury on the evening of same date, 08-April-2016, except I'm in New Jersey (near Philadelphia, PA) on the east coast of the United States, so I was capturing them about five (5) hours later than today's APOD taken from Lisbon, Portugal. The relatively ...

It appears that the comet is - or was heading directly toward an Earthbound view since there are no visible tails(?) Well, I sure hope to catch a glimpse... There is a very faint tail, it points almost straight down in this image (towards about the 6:30 o'clock position). In any case, 252P is headi...

What's going on here? This picture is a cropped version of APOD from March 28, 2013 and the commentary is exactly the same. But the attribution is different. Today's picture (06-November-2015) does not look like the same picture as 28-March-2013 , rather, it's the same objects by a different photog...

At the end of one of the legs of the dancing figure upper left of center is an encircled star. I know too little to hazard a guess. Is this some form of planetary nebula? That would be V1331 Cyg, see: http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/potw1509a/ With its helical appearance resembling a snail’s s...