Starship Asterisk*

https://i.imgur.com/NhoD7eB.png Why does the Milky Way look like an arch? Is it because the Earth is out of the galaxy plane? Or is it in some way due to the use of wide field cameras? It is like looking at a straight line on a dome. It is circling all around us, but we see a section that is above ...

Why exaggerate the vertical elevation? As with most exaggerations, to emphasize things. (NASA was reprimanded long ago for not telling when they did this; at least now they tell us it is double height.) Show it as it really looks. Like this? Same image, vertically reduced to compensate for the doub...

Seems very unlikely that (late) Herschel has taken the picture last month! :^) Friedrich Wilhelm Herschel (15 November 1738 – 25 August 1822 ) was a British astronomer and composer of German and Czech-Jewish origin, and brother of fellow astronomer Caroline Herschel, with whom he worked. […] On 11 ...

The center of the debris ring, the center of the occulting disk, and the center of the star image do not align. What could cause it to be off-center? The "ring" is eccentric (e = 0.12). So the star lies at one focus of an ellipse, not the center. Thanks, I get (the stability of) elliptica...

https://i.imgur.com/JwU2ABy.jpg The center of the debris ring, the center of the occulting disk, and the center of the star image do not align. The universe is under no obligation to make sense to me (NDT) :wink: , but what could cause it to be off-center? Would the influence of the B and C star, o...

Will movies with (sci-fi) space accidents be banned from in-flight entertainment on such planes?

It seems surprising that all the detections so far have seemed so similar. Could something be amiss? Like what? LIGO has a fairly narrow frequency range over which it detects gravitational waves, and the mergers of these midsized black holes is squarely in the middle of it. The wavelength of the gr...

There is no preferred direction for ejected material, and on top of that the sun rotates, meaning today’s thrust will be countered by next week’s thrust in another direction. Over time, it can be expected that all these thrusts will roughly cancel each other out.

Interesting anomaly about the shadow. […] Yet on the far left edge of the shadow and the night side of Saturn there is a distinct arc raised up above the shadow curve. I presume that is an image edit/cleanup that was supposed to stay hidden in the shadows. There is a another such broad brush stroke...

Ann wrote:Is there a lot of X-rays in the Veil Nebula?

ROSAT found quite a lot of emission!

https://i.imgur.com/EKxuYRN.jpg NASA has released a new e-book highlighting intriguing images and key scientific discoveries from its Cassini mission. "The Saturn System: Through the Eyes of Cassini" reveals the top 100 images from the mission to Saturn that explored the ringed planet and...

starsurfer wrote:Jupiter http://www.glitteringlights.com/Images/ ... -p64RR8p/A Copyright: Marco Lorenzi

The motion provides for a cool 3D effect.

I’ve seen this ‘Y-shaped’ outflows with the broad second hand on many eclipse images. Would that shape be stable for the duration (1h33m), and perhaps be a signature of sorts of the 2017 eclipse? It seems the three outflows in that configuration can be seen in Oregon photos as well as South Carolina...

But it is not a coincidence that at some point in the evolution of the Moon's orbit, it happens to look close to the same size as the Sun when viewed from the surface of the Earth. That was inevitable. Still, kind of special, as most moons are much smaller compared to their parent-planet. If our mo...

I drove 5 hours to experience an annular eclipse in the rain and was so glad that I did. Similarly, I did relocate in the early morning on the day of the eclipse in 1999, when my primary observing location (Germany) became (and would likely stay) cloudy. At the second location (north of France), th...

http://i.imgur.com/awzO882.jpg http://i.imgur.com/Mcd2rXq.jpg http://i.imgur.com/tGPAVeW.png Good image! The strong contrast in the upper right and lower left provide much depth perception. I remember the Carina Nebula mostly in two other color palettes: ‘true color’ RGB (middle), and the mix-up pa...

Is it even physically possible for NASA to create a digital reconstruction without vertical exaggeration? If the goal is research and education, then one emphasises the things one wants the audience to look at. Suppose NASA made two versions, once accurate and one exaggerated. Which one will be use...

Sandgirl wrote:Celestial “V” over the East China Sea
Copyrights: Yanguang Zhang
unnamed (2).jpg

Oh, I like that, very nice. The red in the sky seems to sprout out of the horizon like the gas in M82, but that’s not it obviously. Could it be airglow?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJIP8wJY0dg <<In August 2005 a team of geophysicists announced in the journal Science that, according to their estimates, Earth's inner core rotates approximately 0.3 to 0.5 degrees per year faster relative to the rotation of the surface.>> In 2010, Blue Sky Studios ...

Can that be fixed? YouTube is all https now, that is the only thing preventing the embedded video from loading. https, with the s of secure, as in: encrypted connection between server and browser. One character in the webpage source could fix that: src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/o8TssbmY-GM...

Steven I Dutch wrote:By the way, any time APOD publishes something about a solar eclipse, it would be nice to supply a link to a detailed map of the eclipse track.

The wikipedia page has a map and a nice animation.
There was also a cool view from space for this eclipse, which featured as APOD for Nov. 27, 2003.

http://i.imgur.com/uffuSrx.png What a nice view today’s APOD is. I always love auroras. If I may nitpick, the stars in this photo have a sort of U-shape in detail, and the orientation of the U-shape changes from left to right in the photo. What may have caused that, and how does that geometry work?

neufer wrote:Imperial Probe Droid

That was not the Japanese link that I was aiming at, but if you have to invoke Star Wars, then you could have picked the Training Remote, as spherical floater inside a spaceship.

It seems fitting that JAXA provides a small spherical assistant, as previously featured in sci-fi manga and anime.

Today during an introductory astronomy exam I asked two groups of students if they could explain to me in which direction a Full Moon around the Summer Solstice is rising in Europe. Ha, nice question. That was fun. Trivia: it matters if Europe has summer for this, but it is SE for everywhere on Ear...