Starship Asterisk*

Yeah, I read similar contradictory stuff too, De58te. Apart from the image's scale and its similarity to a question mark, I am not willing to speculate.

BDanielMayfield wrote:
The preceding reasoning has been brought to y'all by the (somewhat overused) Coperican Principle; we don't occupy a special place in the galaxy or universe.

Bruce

Following that logic, the parts of the universe where we aren't, might be special.

I'm not very sophisticated. I just pulled up a picture of Jupiter taken with the same detector and compared them from there. No reading required. hehe :) My final answer on the image scale is here: http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hvi/uploads/image_file/image_attachment/19195/compass_large_web.jpg http...

Thanks! I'd put Arp194 at around 1.5 Jupiters, possibly more if you count extended, dim regions that aren't visible in this image. Yes, my numbers are entirely questionable. Just before you posted, I narrowed my "four" Jupiters to "three" (top to bottom of image frame), but the ...

oops ... duplicate

Another curious puzzle ... I've just noticed a number of different websites that say that Arp 194 is in Cepheus, when it is nowhere near Cepheus. It is in Ursa Major. I wonder who was the initial culprit to so successfully propagate this misinformation? Unless I have been similarly misinformed, Arp ...

APOD Robot wrote: ↑Mon Mar 25, 2019 4:07 am including a smaller galaxy superposed on the upper galaxy (see it?)

I will play the game, but I'm not sure. Is it the one I've marked below as "??? 1" or "??? 2"?: (The whole thing looks like a question mark to me.)

Looking at the image and reading the description. If it was taken 40 km (25 miles) from Madrid, why is the city not below the horizon? The curvature of the earth should make the city just a glow on the horizon. Have we been photo-shopped? Considering a perfectly spherical Earth of radius 6371 km, a...

Lovely image. Thank you.

Upon reading more, a lens with no distortions from a perfectly rectilinear/gnomonic projection should indeed make all great circles appear straight in an image. This includes the horizon, celestial and galactic equators, ecliptic, and all lines of constant azimuth and RA. The "trouble" wit...

Thank you for the detailed answer alter-ego. I read all the same Wikipedia articles as neufer, and managed to start confusing and doubting myself. But then I checked a few of my wide angle sky images that included the equator by coincidence, and it was always slightly curved. This is because these i...

Nice. I like it. The heavily dimmed Sun rising in a straight line is quite striking. The straight line of the sun path is by virtue of the direction the camera was pointed, rather than the equinox. Had the sun been less centred in the frame, the path would have been curved methinks. With a normal (...

Ann wrote: ↑Thu Mar 21, 2019 5:43 am Nice. I like it. The heavily dimmed Sun rising in a straight line is quite striking.

Ann

The straight line of the sun path is by virtue of the direction the camera was pointed, rather than the equinox. Had the sun been less centred in the frame, the path would have been curved methinks.

Hawaii contributes to the lunar eclipse darkness, however.

To play devil's advocate ... one possible reason to provide links to previous APODs of the same image is that, if the previous APOD is younger than this discussion forum (The Starship) it can provide easy access to previous discussions of the image.

Very nice. I can also see the centre of the Milky Way, poking through the Earthly clouds on the horizon.

RW5 wrote: ↑Sun Mar 03, 2019 2:06 am Anyone got a 4LY wide butterfly net?

Nah, sold mine. But better to catch it with the HST, than to catch it with a net. Won't somebody think of the butterflies?

Not impossible, just too rare for most of the current generations of humans, perhaps. Some future generations might be luckier in this respect.

And I don't think I'm that keen on living so long. Another thirty or forty years will be plenty for me, thanks.

No, but now that you mention it, it looks like the moon was mooning me.

2080, November to December are the next closest I can find to your ever changing criteria. I won't be alive by then, so I've started to lose interest. These won't be close enough to opposition to see them all looping together. Each planet has a different retrograde period, increasing with distance o...

Ann, here is what my sky looked like a few hours later, 1 hour 20 minutes before my sunrise:

Conjunctions in RA: 2040-08-18 Mars-Jupiter (just after sunset) 2040-09-01 Mars-Saturn (just after sunset) 2040-11-05 Jupiter-Saturn (just before sunrise) But the pick of the bunch might be: 2040-09-08 Mercury-Venus-Moon-Mars-Jupiter-Saturn (all within about 10 degrees, just after sunset, very low i...

It depends on what tolerance one applies to the definition of a conjunction, but I don't think the four planets from Mars to Uranus will line up that closely in our lifetimes. And to be visible nicely in the evening would require Earth to be more or less in line as well.

Very good seeing conditions this morning ... apart from the clouds. I squeezed in 200 sub-exposures of the last quarter moon, before the clouds won. I picked 50 of the least cloudy subs to stack into this image, which is a bit noisier than I was hoping for, but still the best I've ever managed of a ...

I just did a few quick sums in my head to confirm that these solutions look about right.

Seriously, amazing stuff.