Starship Asterisk*

Am I the only one who thinks 3628 looks like the Eiffel Tower? Can the wide part at the bottom be dust in an arm, reaching up an toward us and backlighted by the stellar disk? Then the other arm should be all but invisible to us, making for a little top of the Eiffel Tower before going invisible be...

In a single image, Francis Bozon captured the "red and blue puffiness" of M66, the undisturbed red ellipsoid of M65, and the puffed-up disk ends and tail of NGC 3628. Ann Can the two disks be parallel planes? 1) Judging by visual elliptic form and backlighted dust near cores, the two look...

In a single image, Francis Bozon captured the "red and blue puffiness" of M66, the undisturbed red ellipsoid of M65, and the puffed-up disk ends and tail of NGC 3628. Ann Can the two disks be parallel planes? 1) Judging by visual elliptic form and backlighted dust near cores, the two look...

I'm glad to see a picture by Wissam Ayoub become an APOD! 😀 Wissam has recently started posting pictures at Starship Asterisk*, and he has posted some really fine images here! 😀 https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/2103/BodesGalaxyM81_1024.jpg https://www.astron.nl/~blok/M81data/_Media/m81robsdss_med_h...

The Local Group…has a total diameter of roughly 10 million ly and a total mass of the order of 2 trillion Suns. The M81 Group … has a total mass of (1.03 ± 0.17) trillion Suns. If the diameter of a small cluster, dark halo and all, is ~ ∛mass, then the diameter of the M81 Group is 8 million ly. Now ...

I wonder if 11.8 million light-years is outside of the Local Cluster of the Milky Way + Andromeda + Triangle It is. Indeed, M81 is the largest member of its own small galaxy cluster which is similar to the Local Group in size and mass. Is there, then, two dark halo globes 10-12 Mly in diameter touc...

I wonder if 11.8 million light-years is outside of the Local Cluster of the Milky Way + Andromeda + Triangle

dusty magnetic protuberances 100 ly long, cool

They say the blue stripe is N₂ 8-100 km high, a faint glow where O atoms are colliding with N₂ too frequently to produce their green or red. So the snapsot must be misleading and confusing when suggests to place the blue stripe atop of red and green ones. In fact the blue stripe must be extremely lo...

I wonder why 1) zodiacal light is brightest in the two arcs of zodiacal circle: one centered in the Sun and the other is opposite to the Sun 2) zodiacal light is best viewed after the sunset on the equinox of the Northern hemishpere's spring or before the sunrise on the equinox of the Northern hemis...

Knight of Clear Skies wrote: ↑Thu Mar 11, 2021 12:17 pm Didn't know the zodiacal light might be connected to Mars. So in a loose sense, Mars could be said to have a ring system that spans the solar system.

Or maybe it's a comet tail of Mars

the 590nm yellow color is not rendered correctly if it comes from a monochromatic source. narrow spectrum color rendition in DSLR is just not reliable for wavelengths in between the filters, ie yellow and cyan. for yellow color to be rendered correctly, it must come from a broad spectrum source. ot...

shades are quite elegant:
bluish gray of the front-lighted clouds and brown of the back-lighted clouds.

It's a cold/warm hue pair to color-code what was extracted from infrared range, isn't it?

A balloon and a drone serve different purposes. The former is substantially a survey probe, with limited control over where it goes. The latter is a precision sampler, which can be directed anyplace. Indeed, it's easy to imagine a hybrid system, where a balloon carries a drone, and drops it for clo...

What place is better for aeronautics, Earth or Mars? 1) To charge solar cells, Earth's sun is hotter on a nice day and dimmer in cloudy weather. 2) To shield against a storm, an Earthern hangar must be as solid as a Martian one. 3) To avoid birds, you have to take care on Earth only. 4) To fly, the ...

I wonder whether Venus would have been a habitable planet if, a few billion years ago, it had experienced a collision with a planetoid, such as the one that created the Earth's Moon, and also removed much, but not all of the the then Earth's atmosphere. Had that collision not occurred, would the Ea...

the more complex the life is, the more fragile it is True for what we see on Earth. We have large volumes of liquid almost pure water at 0…100°C, and those are ruled by complex life forms, and only the extreme periphery is left without their domination. But what if a hot or a cold extreme is all th...

Do I get right: an ionization front is like a melting front eating away a snow clump. With time the hot transparent zone is claiming more and more of cold and oblique area? If so, what are the numbers? Is all of the stars' produced energy except neutrinos getting into this phase change? Is the cold ...

Prof Parker wrote: ↑Mon Mar 01, 2021 9:15 am Orientation couldn't be more chaotic. Needs to rotate clockwise 90 degrees - and then - mirror reflect (laterally invert), that is the most unforgivable bit.

Or we can mirror-reflect around the diagonal that is near points 1 and 6.

The zone that is "habitable" in terms of complex life is much narrower than the zone that simply might support life in its simpler forms. I protest. Why proclaim xeno extremophiles primitive? Here on Earth we see just one example of an evolution, global for Earth and isolated from xeno-li...

Only material that interacts with multiple bodies inside the galaxy has the possibility of being captured. Can you please give more details? How can a galaxy or a star form in the first place? How can they manage to drop the energy and the rotation momemtum? OK, the energy can be radiated to the ou...

lumpy potato?
I think I see a pair of lumps glued together.
It seems the 3 to 300 km bodies are mostly two-lobed.
Like the gas molecules in the Earth atmosphere: O₂, N₂ .

Remarkably, I could find only one other reasonably good picture of NGC 1350 on the net, and I didn't much like that picture because I found its colors weird. The bluish cast of the ESO image may be due to the fact that the exposure through a blue filter was twice as long as the exposures through th...

Only material that interacts with multiple bodies inside the galaxy has the possibility of being captured. Can you please give more details? How can a galaxy or a star form in the first place? How can they manage to drop the energy and the rotation momemtum? OK, the energy can be radiated to the ou...

I learn metallicity in steps. First I got to know that low metallicity interstellar medium is a poor radiator and makes for larger stars formation. Now I learn that low metallicity stars after fusioning all the hydrogen in their cores turn to hotter "red giant" phase, and are in fact blue....