Starship Asterisk*

Has there been a poll about APOD viewer preferences? This one might be useful to the people who graciously bring us a picture a day (of course they have to keep in mind that there are many, many more viewers than forum members). Oh... and the moderators should be able to modify the poll if they thin...

Thanks for the link and the very informative diagram from the CFHT group. I took a quick look and decided it's worth mentioning Dr Kaiser's course on galaxies at Southampton:
http://www.astro.soton.ac.uk/~crk/PH227/
The webpage you referenced is one of its nodes.

I'm sorry, I don't see the explanation. The caption says that the light bent by gravitational lensing produces four images of the distant quasar, but it does not explain why there are not eight, or sixteen, or thirty-seven images, or a uniform ring.

Why is it four images rather than a ring?

Now that I've read a little more, it appears lightning is well attested on Jupiter. My question probably should be: are the lightning storms on Jupiter known to be as persistent as the big one observed on Saturn, and are their radio emissions similar? It may just be more difficult to observe them vi...

From a (perhaps too) brief reading of the Arizona web page - the first link in today's APOD - it seems the experts have determined this is a permanent condition in a particular latitude belt of Saturn. Are similar thunderstorms known or surmised on Jupiter?

To see the ms go to http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/photonegatives/ and search for "voynich". Most of the pages are botanical; the astronomical (?) parts may be instructions for when to plant or when to pick certain herbs.

The above answer would work in a vacuum; any helpful answer must be based on empirical data accounting for the atmospheres involved (including Earth's). Also, I am asking if there might be a way of approximately comparing light intensities that would be reasonably objective yet still accessible to i...

Today's (17 January 2005) APOD mentions the '"eery orange light" on Titan but gives no idea of how much light - it can't be as much as it would be if Titan shared our orbit. I'd like to know how much light there is on a distant body when the Sun is high in the sky, taking into consideratio...

I don't use APOD software, but this morning I wasn't able to access APOD with my browser. After the usual connect-and-loading time Netscape told me "Document Done", but there was only a blank rectangle on my screen. Whatever the problem is, it is probably not caused by the software.

After reading that story I wouldn't want the URL to change... I've always enjoyed stories by Ursula LeGuin, so I will surely look for "The Lathe of Heaven". "Antwerp" might be a bilingual pun: the town's French name is "Anvers", which sounds just like "envers"...

Maybe everyone knows this, but what does "antwrp" mean in APOD's URL. Does NASA have a server in Antwerp?

The Spirograph Nebula is always a good show. Perhaps "Harmonograph" would be a better name. Spirographs are driven by toothed gears - mostly on plastic wheels in the modern kids' toy - and so produce perfect periodic curves. Harmonographs are driven by pendulums and so are damped, with the...

Why did Messier miss the third triplet shown in today's (9 September) APOD? Was it that he couldn't resolve it, so that what he called M8 would be M8 and NGC6559 for us?

As a daily visitor to APOD for several years, fwiw, I am not at all bothered by re-runs. Sometimes it is delightful to find a good old APOD one had forgotten.

RJ, I missed that while the link was still up. What was it on the lunaroutreach site that you had found useful? BTW it's "discernible" not "discernable".

Cheers,
Axel

The false dawn picture is indeed magnificent. However, I was put off by the caption which said this phenomenon was "once considered" to be a false dawn whereas it is "actually" the zodiacal light. It would have been okay if the writer was discussing, say, an ancient myth about ec...