Starship Asterisk*

I wonder why planet forming ring is seen brightest, even planet is seen brighter than the actual star? Is it the way the image is taken and processed to show most interesting things blocking/diffusing star's light/brightness ? I'm guessing so. Also I wonder how many planets one can expect to form i...

All a bit Death Star! Hi madtom1999, I don’t understand your post. Can you please explain what you mean? I’m having trigger trouble with my bipolar disorder brain… I’ll explain, I have reason to think that you are part of a conspiracy. Maybe even a deadly one. It’s not your problem but I would appr...

All a bit Death Star!

As a kid I my dad came home with some prints direct from the negatives from the moon and they were just amazing. He also had a glass phial with some supposedly moon rock in. He was a man of extreme views and I did wonder if he was just trying to encourage me into science and these things were just b...

Is there any FLOSS software I can use to play with this stuff at home?

Saw a green flash only once so far. The thing both I and my partner remember was the flash appeared to be across the sky, not just over the sunset. I do wonder if it was the green light being reflected around the inside of the eye but even so the flash was a flash. Not as in the pictures but a lot m...

When you drop iron filings onto a bit of paper over a magnet they tend to clump into 'rays'. It seems reasonable to assume gravity will have a similar effect and tend to turn putative disks into arms. I'm betting this happens at solar system levels too and this would mean planets could easily form b...

Just wondering here - if a star has a very strong magnetic field then when it starts blasting itself out into the cosmos presumably the magnetic field is going to sort the ions and electrons in different directions possibly leading to the asymmetric nebula seen.

Jupiter is a gas planet, Earth has an atmosphere. During aurora the top of the atmosphere is ionised and radiates - but not enough to affect the ground underneath noticeably in earth's case.

Can I be the first to name the RHS of the nebula as the Salmon (head down)?

Is this meant to be an animated gif?

Are those actually layers in the atmosphere or are they digital features?

I wouldnt call that a "Green Flash" OK there was a green 'prominence' above the sun but a green flash lights up the sky (or somehow floods your eyeballs). When you see one you will be rocked by it. The one I saw was associated with a green 'prominence' detaching from the main solar image b...

Is it possible to run a spectrograph over this to get the velocities of the gasses in the nebula and so more fully understand its shape?

I've never managed to see one of these. I put it down to spending 10 years as a chip designer looking at things not much different from these! The best I can manage is looking at a grid and getting it concave/convex. I must confess having seen a friend suffer an agonising headache for several hours ...

A red cross /crucifix in AD 773/4/6 was mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, I've always thought it must be one of these.

While the technology is a bit trickier the weather on Mars makes these mosaics a lot easier!

We appear to be looking down on the accretion disk and yet the jets seem to be heading in the wrong direction for that to be true.

The magnetic field concentrates the solar winds ions into the upper atmosphere forming the aurora. I wonder if Jupiter'.s magnetic field is large and powerful enough to focus cosmic rays at the poles too and these act as triggers for the lightning I thought a magnificent lightning needs a good insu...

The magnetic field concentrates the solar winds ions into the upper atmosphere forming the aurora. I wonder if Jupiter'.s magnetic field is large and powerful enough to focus cosmic rays at the poles too and these act as triggers for the lightning

When I first saw Sputnik Planum I thought 'Ooh that looks a lot like a meteorite crater. Those mountains to the left look like they were one of the debris lobes thrown out from the impact. Or it could have been some gaseous bulge that rose up and then collapsed as stuff leaked out the sides. If it i...

"detailed planning" I would have just moved the tripod to the appropriate place! One of my triggers is when people claim detailed planning went into neolithic monuments so the sun would shine down corridors on the winter solstice when all it really took was two sticks and getting up early ...

In ad 774 there was a red cross seen in the sky, it is also associated with a tree ring C14 spike that year and the next. When looking at planetary nebulae it is easy to see that they could be interpreted as a cross. I wonder if the 774 event was in fact some form of planetary nebula but on a smalle...

It really doesnt look right.

I'm guessing the star is near the RH of the firefox. If is is then are we just seeing X-rays from the bubble that it approaching us and if so does that mean the X-rays tend to be sent in the direction of the expanding gas cloud?