Starship Asterisk*

Well, to a degree. But beyond a certain point- and it's not very large (well under a meter), aperture isn't usually about higher resolution, but about greater light collecting ability. The TMT isn't going to provide any higher resolution for wide angle shots than amateurs are getting every day. Lar...

You've got all that stuff in that small space? No wonder i couldn't tell anything. But even if i did recognize some of it, i still wouldn't have known what you were talking about, even though i spent almost a year and a half in Vietnam. And what's those two gray rectangles?? It's no good if you hav...

Anthony Barreiro wrote:I don't understand what flying saucers have to do with Vietnamese skylore, nor what connection you have to Vietnam.

My Vietnamese sign is the cat, and NGC 2683 is in Lynx. I have no connection to Vietnam, but I do like the Al Stewart song, “Year of the Cat.”

The other day on another forum, someone asked if there were any atheists who lent credence to astrology. Of course, the answer is “yes” (however few). If you look at my avatar, you’ll know what my astrological (tropical?) sign is. However, you’ll also know what I think of astrology. :wink: Someone ...

The other day on another forum, someone asked if there were any atheists who lent credence to astrology. Of course, the answer is “yes” (however few). If you look at my avatar, you’ll know what my astrological (tropical?) sign is. However, you’ll also know what I think of astrology. :wink: Someone m...

Is M83 really a barred spiral, or is it just a regular spiral whose arms are unusually straight near the center? In images of all other barred spirals I've seen, the bar structure is distinct from the arms, but this does not seem to be the case with M83.

The bigger error is in assigning any value for the size of the Universe, which is somewhere between the size of the observable universe and infinitely large... and no current theory allows that to be narrowed down very much. I gave them a pass on that because the pop-up bubble at the end does admit...

Wish I could watch it, but my Internet service (which my ISP laughingly calls "high speed" and "state of the art") is having a bad day. Actually, it's having a bad month. I haven't been able to get through a YouTube video without it choking since about a week before Christmas. (A...

The image of the Virgo Cluster (which shows M84 and M86) is not to scale. It only shows a small portion of the cluster, and that portion is shown too large. Otherwise, this is an awesome work! I learned a lot from it. The scariest part is that if I look hard enough, I should be able to see dust mite...

geckzilla wrote:Meh, I just realized that in my previous post I had managed to paste the wrong URL for "try this image" ... fixed now, but quite a bit too late. Oh well.

Ah, yes, that's very clear!

Chris Peterson wrote:Here's today's APOD in context.

ic1805comp.jpg

Thanks. Geckzilla is right: the image is too small. I can match the dark nebula, but I can only match two of the stars.

No matter how much I stare and twist my head, I cannot reconcile the APOD and Atlas of the Universe images. Can someone give pointers as to how the former fits to the latter?

http://sun.kochi-ct.jp/e/sun-radio-waves.jpg The visible spectrum in that diagram is way too broad, covering most of the range between 1 nm and 1 µm. It should actually cover 380 nm to something over 700 nm, or a fraction of the range between 1 µm and the tick mark above it (100 nm). I don't normal...

So why is the visible-light portion of the Sun shown in false color?

They are in metres and indicate the elevation of the top of the ice. The highest elevation in Antarctica is almost 5000m, at Vinson Massif in western Antarctica, although that area is not nearly as vast as the eastern ice shelf. According to this link, if you don't consider the ice, the highest ele...

Why do all the interesting things happen in the Southern Hemisphere????? OR in the dead of a cold wave the likes of which has not been seen for a decade??? Or at the wrong time? It would be visible from my latitude (in the southern part of the northern hemisphere), except that it doesn't rise until...

owlice wrote:Courtesy of AstroBob.

Thanks, Owlice!

Does anyone know of a chart that shows where Comet ISON is? :?: :?: :?: I've looked all over the place, and the only chart I can find is an outdated chart on Wikipedia. CIOC refuses to post a chart on the grounds that it's not yet naked eye. Huh? By that logic, no one should ever post a chart of Nep...

Ann wrote:

neufer wrote:

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Where's the Pleiades?

Cherry Hill, New Jersey. (So that would place IC 348 in western South Dakota.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PerseusCloudMap.png [switching between the full-size APOD and this map...my head exploded again] That's a big cloud! The map at Wikipedia/Perseus and the map at the Hawaii an Astronomical Society/TheSky disagree on which star is Atik and which star is Menkib (thou...

I’m going to play Ann today. I have a few color questions. I haven’t seen very many detailed paintings of blue stars, but on those that I have seen, the stellar prominences (and chromospheres, for that matter) are depicted in blue. Don’t prominences get their color from H-alpha emissions? Wouldn’t t...

Juwie wrote:Seeing images like this I always wonder if there mustn't happen some star collisions. Or do they happen in a globular cluster - and if yes - how often?

Look up “blue straggler.”

It's deeply troubling, however, that a 19th century scientist , who should have known better, would name a newly discovered chemical element after a god from some superstitious old religion with a geocentric cosmology! Perhaps we can rename this element something more accurate, like "has two p...

Ann wrote:I frankly can't spot jets 3 and 4 in today's APOD, but jets 1 and 2 are obvious.

I can see jet 3 very clearly. I cannot see jet 4.

But I still cannot figure out the narrow black crescent which outlines the top of the planet, and how it appears on the outside of the thin white ring of light which virtually encircles the planet. Is this an instantaneous effect, or the consequence of combining hundreds of component images taken o...