Starship Asterisk*

Thanks astro_uk, your comments are very rational and informative!

Sorry to be a downer, but I think todays picture sets a new all-time low in the quality of visualizations in the history of APOD. A picture of some of those enormous cosmic ray detecting stations would have been much more appealing. For example: http://www-sk.icrr.u-tokyo.ac.jp/whatsnew/060412-SK-m....

Why use methane when we can use Boron and Hydrogen fusion.

Hi harry. I think we are considering using the abundant methane (should it actually be there) on Titan as a fuel source to reduce the expense / payload size of a lander to titan.

bot stopper for new accounts? problem solved.

harry the high quality quicktime one is the same quality as the 104mb gif but compressed better, so theres really no point :p

Hi Matt, the storms in the tropic that form between 5 and 15 degrees are the result of uneven heating of the earths surface by the sun. Warm moist air from the equator moves south (or north as the case may be), is given a spin by the coriolis force and begins to rise as the ambient air temperature d...

good find harry thats awesome!

I suspect that the extra component of the light emitted is in the infrared region, a product of the planet heating from atmospheric effects, perhaps?

http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/ ... ons_2.html

Its such a trivial probelm, so easily solved, and yet nothing is done.

makc
APOD Forum Bully

chill out DavidLeeds, I'm not having a go at you
no sense being hyper sensitive on an online forum

hi orin, i suspect we are seeing 'ridges' in the dust that are illuminated by nearby stars, and since the colours in this picture are fake they have probably been exaggerated to the point where they look like they are self lit. I dont know of any other mechanism which could explain it... it could be...

I agree. The name should be changed so people can't be picky. If you still use 56k, then you are insane ! And if you can't get it where you live, then I feel very sorry for you and I know how it feels :p Could you please stick a thread with a meaninfull title then? Yeah can't you change it makc, to ...

hi brianclark, considering its a 7 year exposure... and this observatory was placed in a 450km orbit (likely not equatorial), I would say that its unlikely the spots represent exact locations as you suggest on the other hand I have no idea how they went about taking that image... it seems a little u...

I agree it is most likely the moon. Whatever it is, it is definitely moving fast around Earth, and I don't know of any star clusters that do that 8)

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap060522.html Hi misho, I don't think there is any filter in particular to block out the stars, the contents of the frame are simply so bright compared to the stars that they do not show up. This is the same reason there are no stars visible in (most of) the moon lan...

I thought nasa TV on APOD made an interesting change. Its unfortunate that not everyone can view it, but the majority of users can. Lets not get too picky about it being the Astronomy Picture of the day, its better than that terrible artists impression of multiple universes. At least this is slightl...

nasa tv streams live all day and night
it never ends, and thats why it has no total time!

Would a hydraulic arm have the same problem? for that matter, would a hydraulic arm work in space?

I think that sounds fair enough harry. Doesn't seem right that the moon system has lots of ice water and jupiter iteself doesn't.

Couldn't the Canadarm2 simply move the entire shuttle around any object, no matter how massive the object is?

thats a good point! if they take it real slow and careful... I don't see why not

haha I can't believe someone actually bothered to write all that up

its made even more silly by the random things like this scattered throughout.[/url]

are there any false colour versions of this one floating about by any chance ?

thanks aichip i get to slap myself for not doing my research I think it is the unprofessional, arrogant writing style of the author which threw me the most, but now I see so many of these images of familiar patterns my suspicions are aroused. I vote for a lander to return rock samples from mars to e...

A quote from that xenotechresearch site: What can be said? This is clearly a fossil of a trilobite, organisms that lived from about half a billion years ago to 210 million years ago on the Earth. Mars evolved identical sorts of life forms and this trilobite is proof of that. If this rock is on Mars,...