Starship Asterisk*

I'm quite puzzled by this picture; I'm not sure what it's illustrating.
Certainly not neutron stars, which have surface temperatures considerably higher than the surface of the sun, and thus would be glowing white, not reddish or brick colored or pink with blue splotches.

Using the word "V band" to mean "visible light filter" is going to be confusing, and I suggest not doing it.

Probably somebody should have told the IEEE not to use the letter V as a radio band designator.

Another image that really really needs color information. Clicking the link in the caption I get this: "This galaxy has been assembled using observations in the V band done by the Subaru Telescope (@ Hawaii) and frames from the Hubble Space Telescope both in 435nm and 814nm wide. RGB data from ...

A great image, but I don't understand the caption. The caption states that the person being photographed in front of the eclipsed sun died a week before the eclipse he was photographed in front of. What am I missing here?

bystander wrote:It's not vertically stretched, it's horizontally compressed.

ROFL.

Really. This is not a feature on Mars.

The explanation didn't make sense until I found the picture of the entire galaxy which this is part of. They should have posted that picture instead or posted a split screen with both. Absolutely agree-- without the context ( https://www.flickr.com/photos/geckzilla/30969093023/in/photostream/ ), th...

Charming. The signature of the solstice, however, is that the sun has (temporarily) stopped changing position from day to day. So the sun is in pretty much the same position the few days before and the few days after. So it's hard to see that a sundial that reads "solstice" on the solstice...

I'm somewhat puzzled about this image. The sky reflected in the river (bottom left) is brighter than the unreflected sky. I can't quite figure that out.

It's a pretty one, but it has moved beyond my tolerance for photocomposites. The zodiacal light is so extraordinarily faint, there is just no possible way you could see that well-lit view of the lake and cliffs and still see the zodiacal light. This is no longer a case of contrast enhancing; it's re...

Come on, really. Orion DOES NOT LOOK LIKE THAT.

Please put in the captions SOMEWHERE what the colors mean.

I look at both sets of photos, but I don't see any tire tracks. The Mars rovers leave tracks easily discernible, so why none visible on the moon? Is the structure of the surface different in some way? I assume there is enough gravity to provide sufficient weight to leave impressions in the 'moon du...

That's a peculiar anaglyph. Usually the red and green images are left and right of each other.

I don't quite understand. "The long shadows it projected onto nearby Lake Michigan near sunset, however, when seen in reflection..." It doesn't seem to make sense to say we're looking at the reflection of the shadows (if these are shadows projected on the late, what is reflecting them?) Ar...

There are, I'm told, good reasons for vertical exaggeration, but I really wish that this would be explicitly called out when it is done.

It would be nice if APOD images had at least a little discussion of what the colors mean.

"That makes Chimborazo's summit the place on Earth's surface closest to the stars."

Indeed. Closer to some of the stars... further from others.

I'll agree with the posters complaining about the vertical exaggeration. It makes it more dramatic... but this is not a "fly over of the Dwarf Planet Ceres". It's a fly over of a imaginary dwarf planet that's a caricature based on Ceres. --for years there used to be a parody organization c...

The caption is a little misleading. It's not that the martian sky is "blacked out" around the solar images; what you're seeing is that when we're pointing the camera directly at the sun, we use a neutral density solar filter, which is so dark that the sky comes out black.

FloridaMike wrote: Gee whiz, science and poetry CAN coexist.

can and do coexist-- http://www.astropoetica.com/-- but the signature aspect of poetry is to use language with precision.

Beautiful image, but I don't think I'd describe the sun as a "world".

"Orb," perhaps.

A very misleading image and caption, I'm afraid. I disagree. That it is a reconstructed radar image is clearly stated. It shouldn't need to say that reflected radio signals were arbitrarily mapped to an orange intensity map. If they had chosen greens instead of reds for APOD, as shown in the recolo...

A very misleading image and caption, I'm afraid. This is a radar image. The dramatic reds and yelows color it have nothing to do with the temperature, or that it is a "once molten" surface. (In fact, all of the rocky planets have a "once molten" surface.) The color in the image i...

JohnD wrote:

Where are the other two?

I'll have to agree here-- I see a double halo, but if there are four halos in the image, I sure can't see them.

Last, Dawn images were digitally recast with exaggerated height to better reveal Vesta's 5-km high mountain Aricia Tholus.

Anybody else want to join the Flat Vesta Society?

Vertical exaggeration is cool... but if you want to know what Vesta looks like, that isn't it.