Starship Asterisk*

I wondered about the future of the Cloud. I'd already heard that storms on the East Coast had crashed some servers, but somehow I never expected *APOD* to be down! I've been visiting this site since the pictures were ever so much smaller than they are now, and I can't remember any previous outages. ...

1. How did such a tiny amount of water come to cover 70% of the planet's surface? Why not 25% or 50% or 90%? Fundamentally, it's a consequence of the flatness of the Earth's surface and the total amount of water. The flatness results from our relatively high gravity, which limits how high mountains...

I never saw this image before APOD posted it. I love it and have shared it widely today. If anybody can point me to an answer to the following questions, I'd be grateful: 1. How did such a tiny amount of water come to cover 70% of the planet's surface? Why not 25% or 50% or 90%? 2. How much has the ...

Does anybody know the latest on the hunt for exoplanets in the Alpha Centauri system? What if you find several exoplanets in the same system but you don't find them in the right order . . . I think that the Observatoire de Geneve and at least one other group are regularly observing the Alpha Centau...

A preprint of the discovery paper for Kepler-22b, by William J. Borucki and colleagues, is now available at archive.org. This paper demonstrates that Kepler-22 is a very interesting planetary system, but it also reveals that the hype we’ve been hearing about a “second Earth” or an “Earth twin” is la...

I just wanted to share my extreme enthusiasm and delight over this new genre of time-lapse photography of the Earth by astronauts in the Space Station. (Is there a shorter way to say that?) "Around the World in 90 Minutes" is an excellent example. Over the past holiday weekend I scoured th...

Thanks for this beautiful gallery of open clusters! I see images of clusters near and far -- no fewer than three renditions of the Pleiades, and one picture of objects so distant that they're part of another galaxy (N11). However, I don't see even a glimmer of two very nearby and highly fascinating ...

I'm glad to see that at least a few commenters were bugged by the inclusion of the phony exomoons. A few studies have argued very cogently that Hot Jupiters won't have any satellites; see Namouni 2010, ApJ Letters [http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010ApJ...719L.145N] and Barnes & O'Brien 2002, ApJ...

Others will probably disagree (and I hope they do), but for me, this was the most boring week in APOD that I can remember.

I'll accept it as a fluke, and look forward to future visions of cosmic wonder. APOD still rules.

Latey I've noticed an APOD trend away from "space photos" toward "Earth atmosphere photos," such as the recent series of meteor shower images and the current selection of November favorites, in which "Earth atmosphere" holds a slim majority. (Is there really a trend, or...

Aha! Thank you for the explanation and enlightenment! I hadn't considered the requirements for photographing lightning. (The sky is an amazing place.)

And many thanks to Piotrek Sadowski for that amazing skyscape -- the globular cluster looks especially gorgeous alongside those bright & dark nebulae. That one also got my vote.

These all deserve to be APODs! Like many responders, I'm especially taken by the Lightning Night from Hiroshi Chang. In that picture, what are the white streaks in the sky? I might guess that they're star trails from a long exposure, but this photo must have been taken with a really short exposure t...

As usual, these are all excellent. I agree with izzyhochberg -- any one of them would make a great APOD. For me the biggest WOW goes to the Messenger image of the Earth and moon -- enlightening, educational, beautiful. Thanks again!

So many beauties I can barely make a choice. I do try to avoid voting for an image just because it's gorgeous, but in the case of the Iris Nebula -- yes, we've seen many, many previous versions of that one! -- I just couldn't help myself. It's got to be among the finest renditions I've seen. So I ga...

My two choices were Galaxies in the River - which includes one of the best almost-edge-on views of a distorted spiral galaxy I've ever seen - and the Easter Island eclipse - because for me that image is just inherently mind-boggling, and APOD is my supreme go-to source for mind-boggles. As Iain Bank...