Starship Asterisk*

A classically beautiful APOD image. It's hard to say any more without using every superlative known.

Great job, Johannes!

-Noel

Reminds me a bit of a photo of Linville Falls I shot back about 30 years ago. It's eroded a good bit since then. Gee it makes you feel old when in your lifetime geology changes... Sigh.
-Noel

Well, just a few off the top of my head... Perhaps these have already been demystified, I don't know. Hanny's Voorwerp http://news.sky.com/sky-news/content/StaticFile/jpg/2011/Jan/Week2/15893272.jpg The Red Rectangle Nebula http://blogimg.goo.ne.jp/user_image/12/42/a17703b631bb8fda88bc451a8330fb3b.j...

I wonder if the pros are doing what the amateur planetary imagers have been doing - take LOTS of short photos, use software to choose the best, then average the best to reduce noise. I imagine that a well-funded highly sensitive professional grade camera would beat the pants off of the webcams amate...

What a STUNNING image of Jupiter from an Earth-bound telescope! Wow!

-Noel

Bah, it doesn't seem to be working today. I did get a result from the beta test site: (RA, Dec) center: (267.31719419, 18.8601948375) degrees RA bounds: 266.699 to 267.933 degrees Dec bounds: 18.4568 to 19.2619 degrees (RA, Dec) center (H:M:S, D:M:S): (17:49:16.127, +18:51:36.701) Orientation: 177.7...

On a different note, does anyone know the exact coordinates of the field of sky... There's a pretty cool web service that will find the coordinates of any photo of sky you submit. For a long time I used the beta version, and now it looks as though they've released it for public consumption... http:...

Yeah, except the smartphone has an embedded computer and far more features, though Captain Kirk didn't see dropped calls. He did have to sign a 5 year contract, though. I always got a kick out of how they could call up and get someone in 1 second or less. "Kirk to Enterprise". Immediately ...

Can't do what he thinks of... Yet.

When Star Trek was new, flat panels with information displays all over the place were sci fi. Automatic doors were even special.

-Noel

I've seen what you're talking about. I also assumed it was distant lightning. I believe the flashes measured by this telescope are quite tiny, though. A single photon, however energetic, crashing into the atmosphere and causing a cascade of thousands of particles isn't going to make a very bright fl...

That's a WAY COOL shot!

I've seen star trails in this telescope on La Palma before... In this video by Alex Cherney starting at about 00:56.

http://player.vimeo.com/video/26709319



-Noel

Chris Peterson wrote:Well... not really.

I suppose you're right... I got kind of carried away. It would look more like this (RGB image)...
179,666 solar masses in that nebula, eh? Thanks for that number, gingerdd!

-Noel

It's a beautiful image! Normally we only see this as part of a wide field of the Heart Nebula, but so much more detail is visible at this scale! I've always wondered whether that dark "ridge" is a ring of dust circling the gas cloud, and at this resolution it looks all the more like it is....

atmospheric phenomena... ...can be traced to well known phenomena I have to agree with Chris' analysis on this one. An insect, caught by an opening-curtain flash, flying lower-right to upper-left. I did a bit of analysis beyond what was done before. I created a color differential image comparing th...

deathfleer wrote:no mountains. I wonder how the mountains were formed on the Earth

???
What makes you say that? Did you follow the link to the high resolution imagery?

I see mountain ranges... For example (I added the red tint for emphasis):
-Noel

So if humans were to build an outpost there perhaps it would have to be mobile, rolling across the surface, say, just following the sunset. Just warm enough, just cool enough to be comfortable. Let's see, if it takes 176 days for each part of the surface to see the sun, that would be, at the equator...

neufer wrote:At the time the animals came in the form of Methane

No cow pie in the sky:

http://www.jgpress.com/archives/_free/000550.html

-Noel

HelgeSkj wrote:I don’t have a cell phone, because I'm deaf.

No longer is that a valid reason for not having a portable computing device.

They aren't worth a damn anyway for having an audio conversation, between rearranged packets and dropped calls...

-Noel

Those who dont have smartphones are obviously stupid.They do way more than just play games and text idiots.Get your head out of your asses and move into the new age. And it's becoming ever more clear that smartphone users have developed simply excellent social skills, not to mention the ability to ...

People keep trying to find uses for these time-wasting portable computing devices, for which they pay by the month forever . As a culture we need to wise-up and realize that hundreds of millions of people walking around with their heads down distracted by stupid phones (they're anything but smart) a...

Gee, with over 100,000 Xeon cores to the task I kind of expected the simulation to have a 4th dimension, but all it seems to be is a static 3D model being rotated.

The music was nice, though.

Anyone know where we are in that model?

-Noel

The "Clean Technologies" of Solar and Wind are too costly without Subsidies and not available on cloudy/stormy days or nights

Gee, it's too bad there haven't been any breakthroughs in battery technology over the past few decades. Oh, wait...

-Noel

How about a massive public works effort to manufacture and install 15 kW or so of solar panels on the roof of virtually every home in the country? With enough quantity / demand there would certainly be breakthroughs in pricing. This wouldn't bankrupt anyone any more than bailing out investment banks...

Typical. People drinking themselves into ignorance of the threat of asteroid collisions. Great idea! :) Don't they brew non-light beer up in Golden? Certainly there are Coors varieties other than Coors Light, and some of them quite good. If so, how would what the brewery smells like be pertinent to ...

This strikes me as the kind of thing that would be better expressed as a video, with a 3D "flyover" showing where all these asteroids are, and maybe even animated to show their motion.

'Course that might scare the hell out of folks (me included).

-Noel