Starship Asterisk*

gee!... What a panorama! :shock: :shock: :shock: I wonder how would be to see at this stellar field, on an hypotetical planet, orbiting around a star, just in the middle of this breathtaking view... Maybe too many GIGANTIC stars in so small volume, would let the nighttime lit as daytime... who know...

I've seen it before, but I don't think I saw it here. Ditto to the comments above - always worth another look. I would be interested to see the differences between the 1995 and the 2007 pics (in different light frequencies etc., but a way to see how the shapes have changed?) IIRC the 2007 Infrared p...

It also seems to be too _low_ to be the geocorona!

What's the red band going across the frame just above the horizon? Is it just an upper-layer of the atmosphere? I'm curious about this too. I assume that the atmosphere appears as that skinny blue band with yellow and green. So what is that reddish band? It follows the curve of the Earth, but it ap...

WRT diffraction spikes - I've occasionally wondered if the support rods could be eliminated by using an angled reflection - an 'L' shaped telescope. The optical design would be more complicated (but I don't really know how much more.) I suspect that there are other reasons why this isn't used - the ...

More interestingly, it appears to me that there is a curved band more-or-less between the two brighter patches, where the texture of the surface seems different - the cell size of the dark and light pattern is larger and the edges less distinct. If this is not an artifact of the picture taking proce...

I see individual droplets of water falling off the bridge, so this can't be a normal time exposure. If it were, the droplets would be streaks if they were visible at all. So I suppose it could be either a rapid series of multiple exposures (and the multiple droplets are the same drops in different p...

The shape of the trail seems consistent with a helical path, and it makes sense that a spinning asymmetrical object would be likely to do this. (This reminds me of that Russian rocket over Scandinavia that left the weird sky figure a month or two ago.[EDIT: Here's a youtube link: http://www.youtube....