Starship Asterisk*

I grew up in a small town in the Texas panhandle. I used to sit on my front porch and look at the Milky Way. Boy do I miss that!

I thought the horse didn't exist in North America until the Spanish brought them over. Why would there be fossils of ancestors of the horse in the badlands?

If there are microbes on Mars, I think we should stay away. The thought of bringing home some new microbes is really scary.

Watch Jupiter and Venus get closer together and meet up with the crescent moon on December 1. Here's a link that was on Spaceweather.
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008 ... 1dec08.gif

Oops, I'm sorry if this post is inappropriate. I wasn't thinking. This forum is to discuss the APOD's! Apologies.

Can you guys tell me the magnitude of Venus and Jupiter at this time? I'm attending a star party for a homeschool group, and I want to be able to tell them how bright those planets are as an example.

If there's so much hydrogen and oxygen in this "puff" or whatever it is, does that mean it may someday make a planet or planets with water???

Here are some articles from Science@NASA about them observing objects hitting the moon. http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/13jun_lunarsporadic.htm http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast30nov_1.htm http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/22dec_lunartaurid.htm If you go to their main page ht...

That picture reminds me of a ball, the almost tennis-ball size that you might buy at the grocery store, you know, the pink ones. It looks like when the ball gets old, maybe it has been out in the yard for a couple of years, and the surface gets brittle and dry and cracks everywhere. That's what Euro...

I wonder if a planet could exist, in that "crowded space", with those just-right conditions that we have here: temperature range, protective magnetic field, an atmosphere that stays put and having the right proportions of gasses, abundant water, and whatever else I'm not listing. And I als...

Here's a sky map from Spaceweather.com

http://spaceweather.com/images2007/05no ... 17qhr8l8j6

In the explanation, the word "curiosity" contains a link to the cat picture.

I remember from when I started first grade in 1960, many times my mother would wake us kids up to watch rocket launches. That was in a little West Texas town. Everyone everywhere was enamored. I still love to watch the launches and follow what's going on in space.

I agree; I love the volcano picture, but would expect to see it somewhere else besides APOD.

I don't think so. If you follow and extend the curve of the handle of the big dipper, the first big star you get to is Arcturus.

I think the constellation Scorpio, containing Antares, is probably behind the mountains. Hasn't Jupiter been hanging just above Scorpio this summer?

The paragraph says the cluster is 12 light years across and contains 500 stars. I looked for some info, and if I interpret it correctly, there are about 25 stars within 12 light years from us. So, if we were on a planet in that cluster, what a sight the night sky would be!

Try this: print the image twice. Cut out one of the parallelograms. On the other page, place the parallelogram over the A space, then slide it down to the B space. Yikes!! Watch it change color in your perception!

I printed the image, cut out the two parallelograms with scissors, and when they were separated from the image, yes, they were the same color. Until then, I couldn't perceive that they were the same color.

When we lived in Abilene, Texas in the 80's and 90's, at least once they stopped there at Dyess Air Force Base. We drove out to where we could see the runway and saw it. It looks pretty cool just sitting on the airliner.

Does anyone know what mountains are in this photo of the shuttle being "shuttled?"