Starship Asterisk*

You guessed that maybe I don't want to use the tools you used to "unscramble" star trail images. Unfortunately, you are correct. I want astronomy to be fun, and doing the kind of things you describe doesn't seem like fun to me. 🙁 Ann Okay, then how about this? Go back to the original with...

One of the most beautiful APODs I've ever seen.

Thanks, Ann! I see that basalt is common on Mars, in agreement with your choice.

Sa Ji Tario, that image did not come through for me, sorry.

I have to say that star trail pictures drive me slightly crazy. That is because I think I should be able to identify the stars, and I try, and I almost think I can do it 🤔, but then I never can. 😩 I get defeated every time. Ann Okay, I opened the image in Photoshop and made a new layer, putting a d...

The art of circling a poll.

RE: Circling the pole for billions of years, and being able to recognize which stars are which from the tracks.
Martin Vargic has created a nice plot of some favorites, including Cassiopeia:

What would that inverted "U" piece be on top of another opposite "U" in the lower left quadrant? Are they loose parts of the probe? (In color blue) Capture.png This? It looks like an unusual rock, to me. But maybe worth a closer look. I wonder what color it "really" is.

The write-up says that this contains data from the JWST. Is that correct, and if so, what did the JWST contribute? Just click on the "James Webb Space Telescope" link in the Image credits part. It looks like stars from the JWST that have spikes, have lots of spikes. 6 large ones and then ...

Hooray for Venus and Uranus, those non-conformists. Or is it because their names ended in "nus" that they decided to turn in uNUSual ways?

Well, I thought I might have found something that would have been helpful to this discussion, but now I'm actually more confused. If you look at this, you can make of it what you will. Directly from the copyright link in the APOD caption, one gets to: https://m.weibo.cn/u/7430235891 About 20 inches ...

So, is the "dark rocky outcrop" not just another "volcanic stack"? I don't see much difference between it and the other stacks in the background. Right. The large one in the foreground, dominating the picture, is one of the volcanic sea stacks. A typical one, just the closest on...

Are you talking about protoplanetary disks? I don't think there's any mechanism by which planets could form with retrograde motion in an accretion disk. Thanks for asking. It certainly makes sense that really no planet would get a retrograde orbit , excepting some freakish occurrences. I'm just tal...

the spin conservation law works like this. When a bunch of massive things spin and travel without any external interaction, the sum of every spin along an axis is constant however you choose an axis to calculate the spins. If a thing is travelling along a line, it has an orbital spin of mvR, where ...

The caption here indicates a time break. Not a stranger situation, like a time disordering, which would be truly unsettling (bad pun) -- just a time break. I'm no geologist, but this must happen a lot, right? All you need is for something to erode away a structure's top layers, and then much later, ...

... Google is your friend. There are a number of time lapse videos out there which show cloud motion in the bands and in the Red Spot. Videos made with data from probes as well as from ground based telescopes. Well, I swear that the last time I tried googling it, I did not find any time lapses that...

For a long time, I have thought -- if Jupiter's surface is really clouds, then those cloud formations ought to swirl, and waft. They certainly have the appearance of swirls, but always we only see what looks like a still snapshot, so we cannot see the wispy, undulating motion. One problem is that th...

Nice discussion AVAO and Ann, and thanks for the context images. I wonder what led to the dark red airplane shape you pointed out in one of your posted images, Ann. Some of these natural questions would be easier to answer if we could observe for a few million years. Since we can't, deducing distant...

Hello, I labeled the Saturn image in the middle of Gemini as 2003-4, as Saturn's opposition was on 1st January 2004, and that Saturn season was split equally between 2003 and 2004. I was able to image the planet in November 2003; I was not able to photograph Saturn around that opposition because I ...

Thanks Mark. I assumed, because I didn’t know better, that the Saturn images were taken as close to one year apart as possible. No doubt there’s software that can help with planning (or explaining) this sort of thing. Rob Maybe some that's especially good for it. I certainly like good old Stellariu...

Wouldn't Jupiter have crossed paths during the conjunction? No planet can be seen. I wonder if they were digitally removed? I don't know though. During the conjunction of December 2020, Jupiter and Saturn were about 20 diameters of Jupiter apart in apparent position. While this was close, and for s...

Is this supposed to be an accurate composite? I don't like to suggest this, but it looks somewhat faked... Look at how the meteors are in-line with each other. That's not how a random distribution would look. I believe the random motion between the meteors is minor compared to the collision speed b...

Ann wrote: ↑Mon Aug 15, 2022 7:36 pm
Well, that "alien-scarecrow" of a song was recorded in 1963, so it has been broadcast for a little less than 60 years, so we know that the aliens that have been horrified by it live less than 60 light-years away!

Ann

Great point. I keep forgetting things like that.

Basically, the entire 360° view of the MW is presented in cylindrical coordinates. Instead of mapping the MW center to image center, the first 2 exoplanets were centered. Doing so results in the sine-wave-like distortion of the MW in the image. Other mappings would distort the MW band differently. ...

Ann wrote: ↑Mon Aug 15, 2022 6:39 am
I'll belatedly try to answer some of your questions. I'll try, mind you!
...
Ann

Thanks!

We're wandering far afield of Astonomy now, but my favorite use of nonsense words is in the song Surfin' Bird by The Trashmen. Utter insanity toward the end there. Good stuff. :-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Gc4QTqslN4 It is astronomically significant. In an unfortunate quirk of fate, this vid...

Pretty pleasant "music of the (planetary) spheres". Does the eccentricity of the circle representing the planet mean anything? I don't know why the sky in this video has been distorted in the way it has. At least, it would be nice to have some information as to what conformal mapping was ...