Starship Asterisk*

Hey yall - please pardon, but I have 2 thoughts. 1 Has anyone got a good guess as to which came first - the text or the illustrations? My own experience goes back to manual techniques, and this appears to me to be some one, some the other, some both... 2 There appears to me to be a rhythm to a great...

OK, I can accept that. Thanks.

OK, now you've really piqued my interest. First, the latitudinal orientation I was speaking of refers to the star relative to the line-of-sight, not the line-of-sight relative to us, to wit: any idea which way the axis of the source star is oriented? Second, thanks, dust globule was my first guess a...

Sighting confirmed. My first thought is a globule of denser material Does anyone know if our line-of-sight is polar or equatorial, or something in between?

Hi all. Please pardon me, I don't post very often, have no wish to offend or be taken as snide. I have discovered I don't really understand the term 'universe'. I have always thought (I'm well past mid-life, been interested in this stuff since early teens) the term refers to a totality, an infinitud...

NoelC: Thanks, we're cool. IMHO 'engineers' in general are any people who use formal protocols to answer questions and/or build new things and/or improve old ones. I'm aware of the common exclusion based on collegiate degree, and the other based on particular discipline, and I subscribe to neither. ...

im so sorry - i certainly did not mean to start personal wars -

what about the technical questions?

or is the change of subject schizophrenic?

In looking for responses to a more recent thread(s), I discovered a couple of posts to a thread I thought was closed. OK, maybe I really am a self-righteous, overbearing, ignorant jerk. Strange that I have managed to have a fairly successful career in a field that absolutely demands interaction, sha...

or maybe they're testing us ...do they have large eyes and silver skin?

Hi all...my apologies for starting a new thread without first reading this one...I'll try to be more observant in the future... As for the debate about whirlpools, I have a few comments: First, I believe these are more commonly known as 'eddies', or an 'eddy'. Second, keep in mind these are ALL 3D+ ...

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/ ... t_full.jpg
Here I am again, with yet another silly question:

What is the formation just above the 'middle' of the collision? Is it really an 'eddy', or merely an optical delusion?jw

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/ ... ersole.jpg

What is the object above-right of center? Looks like there is some reaction to energy near the 'center' of the 'lemnisca'.jw

OK, I can see some apologies are in order, and maybe a clarification or two. If I came across as a bit high-handed out of the gate, that was not my intent. I am an engineer, and when someone cuts me short with what I see as an over-simplistic answer, I take umbrage. Apparently I was expecting far to...

Many thanks to you all. You have provided me with a modicum of entertainment, along with confirmation of certain secret opinions of mine. I was trying to open a dialog in which members could offer speculations, perhaps even with some supportive reasoning, regarding a phenomena that (I thought) offer...

Sorry to have waited so long, but I got busy with other things... I did communicate (sort of) with Josch Hambsch, and received the same answers I got here, plus a moderately pointed comment that instrument time was far too expensive to waste it on such a trivial object as this asterism. IMHO the so-...

To FieryIce:

Many thanks. That is easily the most constructive response yet.jw

Again, my apologies to all. I was hoping to initiate a discussion that would seriously speculate on alternate possible origins for the visible phenomonem. I am not a scientist, nor even an astronomer - neither amateur nor otherwise - I am just interested in the universe, human knowledge, and the lim...

Wow, such erudition. I'm sorry, for a minute or two I thought I had misspelled curiosity as r-i-d-i-c-u-l-o-u-s. Here's an idea: could we find a phenomonen, not really commonplace but not unique, that might explain this? Perhaps something we have been learning occurs more frequently than we thought ...

reeeely. ya think? couldn't possibly be anything else, could it? naah.jw

Just below and right from the mentioned galaxy (call it 430) there is an interesting circle of stars rather close together that looks kind of blank in the center. What is it?jw

oops, I messed up - - it is APOD0806jw