Starship Asterisk*

spaceflight has taken a significant step away from being an endeavor that only big governments can do with public money I'm a bit puzzled here. Surely this is all paid for with public money? It seems to me highly unlikely that a private company would ever pay for something like the ISS. Has it not ...

Hundreds of new visitors have arrived at Galaxy Map over the past two days looking for a map showing the location of Kepler-22b. To meet the demand, I've created a poster here: http://galaxymap.org/kepler22b/poster.png and will be supplementing this with a new article further explaining the poster o...

You've supplied the wrong caption for Zeta Oph.

Just to add one correction (although I'm sure that someone else would jump in to add this if I didn't): the zodiacal dust appears as a straight line using ecliptic coordinates, not equatorial coordinates. With equatorial coordinates both the zodiacal dust and the galactic plane appear as sine waves ...

Just to add that in celestial coordinates the zodiacal dust is a straight line because it is concentrated within the plane of our solar system.

I believe that this concentration was caused by the original debris disk out of which all eight planets (and the Sun itself) formed.

kjardine, thank you very much! I beg your indulgence; I have another question... why does the local zodiacal dust show up as a wave? Rather, how it is that it is so well organized? I thought the wave might possibly be an oscillation artifact from processing of some kind; I didn't think it'd be real...

it makes me think of waves crashing on the beach I can see that. :-) I was asking about the wave (don't know what I'd call it -- too square to be sine, not square enough to be square?) that is visible in the image kjardine linked to . Ah, I though that you were referring to the APOD image. If you m...

What is the wave in that picture? The "wave" is part of the Sco OB2 association, the nearest OB association to our solar system. It consists of many extremely hot O and B class stars immersed in the Ophiuchus dust clouds. Many of these stars are visible without optical aid as Scorpius, th...

It's interesting to compare this with the original IRAS image from the 1980s:

http://galaxymap.org/mwe/mwe.php?centre ... _markers=1

RJN wrote:I have gone back and added a note to the bottom of the latest APOD page that "Canis Major's galaxy designation is now disputed" and linked it to this thread.

Thank you for that. I've just blogged about the Canis Major controversy here:

http://galaxymap.org/drupal/node/164

Just for the record, I've added another comment to the talk page for the wikipedia article for the "Canis Major dwarf galaxy" listing 8 recent scientific papers concluding that the Canis Major "overdensity" is not caused by a dwarf galaxy or at least is more consistent with other...

There was an APOD specifically on the Canis Major Dwarf: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap071104.html . Perhaps the explanation there is more satisfying. Indeed, though, our APOD explanations are rarely perfect -- but we try. Thanks, kjardine, for point out that reference. - RJN Hi Robert, Thanks for th...

Wikipedia has a process for making these sorts of changes, if needed. Register and participate. It's a Good Thing. :) If you check the discussion for that Wikipedia article, you'll see that I recommended that the article be deleted about two years ago. I was even supported by another poster who add...

There have been quite a number of articles published in the scientific literature questioning the existence of a Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy. See: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2008ApJ...672..930V as just one example. (This article points out that the Orion Spur extends in this direction and is a more ...

there is interesting "Saturn-like" object. To add some more information, this object is visible in this Hubble NICMOS (near infrared) data here: http://archive.stsci.edu/cgi-bin/mastpreview?mission=hst&dataid=NA132G060 (you have to view the FITS file to see it) at the exact coordinate...

Hi Martin, Yes, the link is correct. You can download the FITS file and use a FITS viewer to look at it. The preview image they provide at the link is too dark to be usable, which is why you need to download the full FITS file. There are many FITS viewers available. One popular one is Aladin, which ...

Hi Martin, I've tracked down a NICMOS plate at this location: http://archive.stsci.edu/cgi-bin/mastpreview?mission=hst&dataid=NA134R070 The coordinates turn out to be 17:45:28.75 -29:04:21.5 Unfortunately, the object does not appear on the plate at all, even though all of the surrounding stars d...

Martin, I haven't given up on this yet. Your fuzzy object is also visible here: http://hubblesite.org/gallery/album/pr2009002b so we know that the data was collected by Hubble's NICMOS instrument. It is definitely not visible in the Spitzer or Chandra data. It doesn't look like an artifact to me. I ...

Here is a close up from the Apod image. Scroll to right. I've now put this NASA composite image in the Milky Way Explorer, and you can see the object/artifact mentioned by Martin here . This is a bit of a puzzle because this composite image is supposedly constructed from three previously released N...

Hi Martin, This is a false colour image using X-ray and infrared data that our eyes can not see. The green stars are X-ray sources emitting in the 3-5 keV energy range. I don't see a "little bubble type object to the right of Sagittarius A". You can see Sagittarius A here . If you look at ...

Close to the centre of the picture in the left bottom quadrant there is interesting "Saturn-like" object. The picture must be zoomed strongly to find this. What is it? Hi Osmo, I've also wondered that. This object is visible in this Hubble infrared image , which is where I first spotted i...

I know it's hard to believe, but the colours of the two squares are exactly the same. You can verify that by copying the image and pasting it into a paint program. If you hover an eyedropper over the squares, you will see that they are both RGB = (120,120,120). What this shows is that colours as we ...

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.' Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There Not sure I agree. Stars and nebulae both have common names (eg. Sirius or the Lagoon nebula) tha...

Hi bystander, I did read your post. When I said "I wonder if this is a name that APOD made up?", I meant originally, as there are APOD references to it going back to at least 1998. Wikipedia is largely a reflection of information that can be found on other websites (eg. APOD) and I would t...

Two APODs out of Three says it's a Bug and not a Butterfly. As I pointed out in the *other* discussion thread on this image: http://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=17340 SIMBAD lists 28 identifiers for this object: http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/sim-id?Ident=NGC+6302 including "Bu...