Starship Asterisk*

geckzilla wrote:Better watch out, owlice. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_prime

It is a source of constant disappointment to me that the legal profession has no issue with making certain numbers illegal, or patenting genes, or patenting mathematical algorithms, etc, etc, etc.

We are a flawed species.

Around the 10th, Saturn is fully immersed in Vela Wow, your image led me to the Solar System Simulator: http://space.jpl.nasa.gov/ Never knew that existed before. Thank you! And based on that, I'd have to concur that Saturn was within Vela from Cassini, during 10 Oct 2013. Based on shadow orientati...

Is there an obvious/practical/easy way to determine the point at which the sky background noise dominates the readout noise? I've never considered readout noise before. There are a number of exposure calculators out there, like this one. Google for more. Most describe the math involved, as will any...

Susanna could have "denyed" things in an attempt to get the money. It could just as easily have been a misunderstanding by James Cooke. Or maybe Susanna was illiterate. It is not clear. Judith sounds like the black sheep of the family. I'm quite sure she didn't write the works attributed t...

Iota Antlia is one of those dime-a-dozen K0III stars. For all intents and purposes it is a distant Pollux, pale yellow and not too bright. It's the kind of star that wouldn't stand out in any way, certainly not by visual inspection. It could certainly mimic one of Saturn's moons. My only objection ...

Thank you again Chris. That's very useful information and helps me better understand the jargon too. Is there an obvious/practical/easy way to determine the point at which the sky background noise dominates the readout noise? I've never considered readout noise before. On a good night from my backya...

Glad I asked. But I take it there is no need for "panic shopping" just yet.

Thanks Anthony, you may well be right about Iota Antila. It took me two coffees this morning before it dawned on me that Prometheus and Pandora (which both have an apparent mag of about 16) would appear much brighter to Cassini than to us, and hence would be much more comparable to a bright star lik...

we don't see anything moving towards us at a substantial percentage of c (well... there may be some jets) Jets? Are these the "jets" propelled by warp drive already discussed here, or something else entirely? I have come to expect your answers to reveal esoteric new dimensions of the univ...

Are there any moons visible in the image? So far I've found two small spots outside the rings, but I can't see anything I can unambiguously identify as a moon. Are they too small at this scale? Rob The pictures in this mosaic were taken on 10 October 2013. I took a look at Saturn on that date on Sk...

Art, not that I'm a prominent person and not that being prominent is important here, but you may add me to the list of "middle grounders" with a reasonable doubt. As stated earlier, I think it's too late for this mystery to ever be resolved with certainty, and as such I really do think tha...

A noob question which may have been asked before ... Assuming I wanted to create a 10-minute exposure, would there be any technical difference between stacking, say, 20x30-second sub-frames and 5x120-second sub-frames? Obviously, it is more convenient to stack less sub-frames, but easier to track a ...

I think I see three little moons near the outer edge of the rings along image top. Can anyone confirm this and identify them? To answer my own question without confirming anything, I'd guess that from left to right, we can see either Janus or Epimetheus (not sure which), then Pandora, then Promethe...

I think I see three little moons near the outer edge of the rings along image top.

Can anyone confirm this and identify them?

Beyond wrote:Then they are acting out the parts of stage-hands and such, are they not

Or maybe we're over-thinking it.

Beyond wrote:Almost the whole world are actors Who, praytell, is shirking their duty

Some work behind the scenes.

That's just beautiful. Thank you APOD.

Is that "ringshine" I see on the far side of the planet? Fantastic!

Shakespeare said that we (humans) were but actors on a stage playing our parts. Yes, but that may not have been Shakespeare's own work :lol2: ... "Ultimately the words derive from quod fere totus mundus exerceat histrionem (because almost the whole world are actors) attributed to Petronius, a ...

Sure, certainty on any identity is most likely lost, but we often have to deal with degrees of certainty. If there is a reasonable degree of certainty that Shakespeare wasn't who the literature books teach then it's worth investigating. But yeah, if there isn't any evidence for it then there isn't ...

My point was only that the time for achieving any certainty on this matter has long since passed. It is too late. Even if the tide of popular opinion ultimately flows towards the Oxfordians, it will not necessarily make it true. Q: What's the difference between a religion and a cult? A: About a hund...

[flame] Literary pseudo-history and revisionism. Why? Shakespeare by any other name would smell as sweet. The comparison with Galileo is bordering on offensive. Galileo's ideas were demonstrated by clear observations of the world around him, in his lifetime , and he was arrested and suppressed for i...

Thanks Chris. I didn't know there were any known massive objects moving apart that fast with respect to another. All of the Universe on the other side of the horizon the defines our observable universe is moving away from us at faster than c. That's what makes it unobservable. But those relative ve...

Whether it was approaching or receding above C, I'll simply say that no known object, massive or otherwise, could travel faster than light according to best current theory. That's not true. The Universe is full of objects that are moving away from each other faster than c. That poses no problems wi...

All that consumed spaghetti would also explain the enormous increase in mass you would suffer when approaching the speed of light. No, I considered that. Done properly, you will have consumed all the energy just as you pass through, so your rest mass should be back to normal (I assumed 80 kg) at th...

[unfounded speculation]

Maybe an observer on Earth could detect the boundary of the warp bubble, as the Enterprise approached within it? Perhaps the bubble would mask the things behind it?

[/unfounded speculation]