Starship Asterisk*

Another incredible post, as always.

One smidgen of concern, in the last sentence, did you mean "... currently scheduled ... " ?

Given the high profile of this site, maybe getting the English department involved might not be a bad idea.

It's beautiful. Is that what is meant by "esthetic" - or did you mean, aesthetic?

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=define%3Aesth ... definition

I'm curious about this:

in this final image of the payload

What makes this "final?"

As a devote named Steve, I am all for any phenomenon bearing my name. The problem here is that an A ll S ky S teve turns into something at the other end of the fish's eye - if you get my drift. Couldn't we have called it the FULL Sky Steve? Or just Steve? By the way, those strong thermal emissions w...

The same has been for the Huygens probe... Why make a probe who could survive that harsh environment only for 90 minutes.... You make a probe to accomplish its mission, with some allowance for a margin of safety. Going any further adds time and cost, and probably weight. NASA doesn't get enough mon...

Excellent picture, and who better than Babak Tafreshi to get the shot?

But how did he also take this one? The caption doesn't give its usual information about how the image was captured.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/deepskyco ... 672924221/

Last line doesn't quite make sense. Someone needs an editor!

A fortunate COINCIDENCE ... ?

Is it only me, or...

Why does it appear that the image seems abnormally large? The apparent image of the rocket itself seems to be leading the plume. But at the likely distance from the rocket, it shouldn't be nearly that large.

No chance there was some photo manipulation here?

So why does there seem to be some asymmetry here? Did the camera stand wobble because of global warming?

Fantastic job, Chris!

As an average viewer, I would have liked to see an inset showing a series of pictures taken with identical exposure times / filters. The two gorgeous views here force the viewer to read the information and understand that one image is 6 times fainter than the other.

Steve

Did you really mean "sentiments"?
Or
Sediment?

... made "its" closest pass ...

Towards the end of the paragraph.

spellchecker here - shouldn't it be "discernible?"

Funny, all I can see is a pterodactyl....

Maybe that's where the dinosaurs went?

instead of "This September equinox signal that winter..."

did you mean

"This September's equinox is a signal that winter ..."

PS - I'm also glad that the next one has been scheduled.

Direct picture link gets a 404:

Not Found
The requested URL /apod/image/1407/m106_lg2048jpg was not found on this server.

Dear Dr. N, Thank you for many years of wonderful pictures and information. Since you've asked, in general, I do find the leading question annoying. It's generally not fully germane to the subject at hand, and does get in the way of delivering information. But that's not to say it can't be better, o...

Don't you mean "...it WAS pushed (outside) by the space station crew..." ?

Is my monitor in need of cleaning again? Or is there a smudgy thing about 4 degrees out from Mars, on the 330 degree radial?

Beautiful.

I had to pull the main gif off the page to view it. I probably have something disabled in my browser, but nothing that I know of that interferes with an animated gif. Anyone else?

And what about that surprisingly bright fracture on the lower left? Is it possible we're seeing a relatively recent layer of water ice? And what's the process that turns it from fresh-ice-blue to snow white?
PS - It's on the lower left in the high-res image...

Maybe if we turn the picture upside down and inside out...

No, I can't see a photographer either. So this is either another case of "where's waldo?" or a grad student slipup.

I'd like to petition for a moratorium on links to funny cat pictures as well.

Gorgeous photograph. A bit tough for us amateurs to pick out Saturn and Jupiter, however. More to the point, the semicolons are overused. A semicolon separates what could normally become two sentences. A colon is used at the end of a sentence to demarcate the beginning of a list. The components of t...

Good pic - always a fan. There's a chance to make this sentence in the description a bit clearer. "In the most recent encounter that about peaked 40 million years ago, the smaller galaxy is swinging around counter-clockwise, and is now slightly behind the larger galaxy." I suggest moving i...