APOD: The Teapot and the Milky Way (2018 Jul 20)

[APOD Robot]

The Teapot and the Milky Way

Explanation: The recognizable stars of the Teapot asterism in the constellation Sagittarius posed with the Milky Way over Death Valley, planet Earth on this quiet, dark night. The surreal scene was appropriately captured from Teakettle Junction, marked by the wooden sign adorned with terrestrial teapots and kettles on the rugged road to Racetrack Playa. Shining against the luminous starlight of the central Milky Way is bright planet Saturn, just above the star at the celestial teapot's peak. But the brightest celestial beacon, high above the southern horizon, is an orange tinted Mars at upper left in the frame.

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[De58te]

Cool picture with Mars. Are those tea kettles in the foreground? This reminds me of a running TV gag that was on a show in the 1970's either Laugh-in, The Benny Hill Show, or Monty Python, I am not sure which. An old man lost in the desert for weeks is crawling on his hands and knees crying, "Water! Water! Water!" He struggles up to the teapot stand (seen here), "I'm saved in the nick of time." Grabs one pot after another putting them up to his parched lips, but spits them out. "Tea! More tea! Oh, (expletive), you know I only drink coffee!"

[Boomer12k]

Teakettle...Teapot...and "The PIPE"....

Drove through the Mojave back in '89....
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[starsurfer]

This is really cool! I would love it if Kerry imaged more planetary nebulae!

[Guest]

Neat idea! I bet there are a lot of other National Park place names that could have appropriate stellar backgrounds. Maybe you have done some already?

[Chris Peterson]

Sagittarius looks so odd in recent weeks, with Saturn in it. Saturn looks quite stellar at the moment, and its position above the Teapot- one of the most obvious asterisms in the sky- startles me every time I look south. It's like the asterism itself grew a new member.

[saturno2]

Saturn, Mars, Milky way, Valley of death,
Teapots and teapots.
Well, it is a surreal image,

[neufer]

Ubehebe (pronounced YOO-bee-HEE-bee) Crater

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Sediment stripes on the walls of the Ubehebe (YOO-bee-HEE-bee) Crater

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<<Teakettle Junction is at the junction where the Unimproved road from Ubehebe (pronounced YOO-bee-HEE-bee) Crater meets roads to the Racetrack Playa & Hunter Mountain. Ubehebe Crater is a large volcanic crater of the Ubehebe Craters volcanic field in the northern half of Death Valley, USA. The crater is a kilometer wide and 200 m deep. The age of the crater is estimated from 2,000 to 7,000 years old.

The crater was formed when magma migrated close to the surface and the heat of the magma caused groundwater to flash into steam, throwing large quantities of pulverized old rock and new magma across the stony alluvial fan draped across the valley floor. The magma rose through a fault that lies along the western base of Tin Mountain. The resulting large steam explosions are called a hydrovolcanic or phreatic eruption by geologists and the pits created are known as maars. Ubehebe was the last and largest in series of similar eruptions in the immediate area (its eruption exceeded the tensile strength of the bedrock by 10 times). Earlier eruptions created a group of much shallower maars to the south and another to the west. Little Hebe is a spatter cone that grew in the middle of one of the largest maars in the south group. The only significant deposit of lava in the volcanic field is contained in Little Hebe.

Miocene-aged mostly reddish orange-colored conglomerate makes up the exposed bedrock in Ubehebe's walls. These sediments were deposited by streams and contain limestone, mudstone, quartzite and volcanic cobbles that are up to 20 cm in diameter. There is also a difference in color between these seabed sediments: On the left these sediments are yellowish in hue while on the right they are orange. The reason is due to a fault that separates the two different sedimentary units; over time at least 120 m of vertical displacement along this fault has resulted in the abutment of these two different sedimentary units.>>