Starship Asterisk*

constantino wrote: What kind of telescope do you need to see an 11.5 magnitude objet?

FWIW, there is a Telescope Limiting Magnitude Calculator at Cruxis.com. It turns out that 11.5 doesn’t require extreme apertures, but the limiting magnitude depends on a lot more than just aperture, as the form shows.

Thursday's eclipse , however, will only be visible from parts of southern South America and Antarctica. Unfortunately, the linked NASA site mixes ‘http’ content (embedded map) with ‘http s ’ content (page), which results in blocking the insecure content with certain (safe) browser settings. That is...

Very creative to image the eclipse like this.

RET wrote:The bright star upper right is not Sirius, but Procyon, I suppose.

A fine correction!
Al Tarf (β Cnc) between the Moon and Procyon (a CMi), and the trio ζ CMi, 14 CMi, HD 66141 below Procyon, help fixing this frame on the sky.

RocketRon wrote:

APOD Robot wrote: Two smaller galaxies in the group are visible on the right.

Visible on our left, perhaps ?

That line seems to be copied from the APOD for December 19, 1998, which has a different orientation.

Beautiful, and quite similar to a sequence from the Hubble 3D (2010) movie, narrated by DiCaprio.
Intuitively the valley looks weird, as the view is distinctly not isotropic, with a clear open space on the near side and a fluffy nebulous bedding on the far side. Pretty, but how realistic?

https://i.imgur.com/NIkeOrY.png The radio pulsar B1727-47 proper motion vector v ⊥ points at the center of the SNR RCW 114, suggesting SNR–PSR association. In this case the most plausible distance to the system is ~700pc [~2,300 ly] and the p.m. based age is 60−80 kyr, compatible with the pulsar ch...

I find it strange that many parts of the Witch Head Nebula are as non-blue as they are. Some blobs are downright beige. What is the light source illuminating the beige blobs? Could it be that the two beige parts (at the 4 o’clock angle) have red nebulosity knots shining through? It is in the path, ...

Ann wrote:get my bearings

Astrometry.net can process this image and help identify its place in the sky. The bright star is identified as HD 27029.

The Hα is much more emphasized, compared to last year’s image by Mr Andreo, which was then one of the best available at that angular size and next to a familiar object. What strides we have made! These ionized hydrogen clouds surely lie in the foreground of the scene, well within our Milky Way Galax...

Guest wrote:Falcon 9, but not Heavy.

Well spotted, can’t be both: Falcon Heavy is a different beast. Falcon Heavy hasn’t been launched yet. Demo launch now scheduled for January 2018.

… that are part of a developing global communications network . Fascinating to see the deployment of the 10 satellites. Also awesome how they managed to put extra hosted payload on them, to monitor planes and ships. Makes me wonder, once fully operational, would this have sped up the search effort ...

https://i.imgur.com/1gW2tTt.png Personally I just love the portrait of the winter Milky Way and the "Winter Pentagon", or what is it called? Perhaps it is called the "Winter G"? :lol2: http://asterisk.apod.com/styles/prosilver/theme/images/quote.gif Wikipedia wrote: The Winter H...

This reached the regular broadcast news this morning in my country, accompanied with some of the images from the same video. They emphasized the same size in planet count to our own system.

Alnitak , Alnilam , and Mintaka … They lie from 800 to 1,500 light-years away The first three links mention 800, 1340, and 915 light-years, but these Hipparcos geometric distances are further than parallax can be used for with accuracy (up to ~200 pc/652 ly). In contrast, Wikipedia shows distances ...

A different artist's interpretation... itcamefromspace.jpg https://i.imgur.com/SPC9lzk.jpg BURKE: Nice room. I’m Burke. Carter Burke. I work for the company, but other than that I’m an okay guy. Glad to see you’re feeling better. I’m told the weakness and disorientation should pass soon. Side effec...

https://i.imgur.com/HfNdGG7.png … constellation designated by the International Astronomical Union in 1922 … Celestial nomenclature had long been a controversial topic. At its inaugural meeting in May 1922 in Rome, the IAU standardized the constellation names and three-letter abbreviations. (So, fo...

Halfway between the occulter and the left part of the image, is this another comet ? I think not. If you view the ~264 frame click-through movie (75 MiB), the comet 96P and the stars move slowly, but you can see a lot of specks and streaks coming and going, and that one only appears at frame 114 (2...

Without the vistas, what’s the appeal of an underground base? It will be just as depressing as living in a bomb shelter or converted missile silo (with restriction to not go outside). I think people *need* windows to be able to look outside. People on the ISS report not only enjoying the Cupola and ...

Thanks for the correction, I should know that. I’ll edit. (I guess the error wasn’t big enough for my own ‘this can’t be right’ gut feeling.)

https://i.imgur.com/o2m27x1.png high above the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy oh, please... this is nonsense LDN 183 does lie higher above the galactic plane than the Sun in the absolute sense, and as such we view it to be at 37° above the galactic plane from our perspective. For reference, LDN 183 ...

Thanks Ann, that’s a pretty impressive wide angle view.

https://i.imgur.com/q34VMwF.png ..."chemical constellation"....??? What does it mean? The familiar APOD play on words: Long ago (1756), Fornax was named by French astronomer Nicolas Louis de Lacaille, originally as le Fourneau Chymique (the Chemical Furnace), before being abbreviated to j...

At the core lies a supermassive black hole. http://asterisk.apod.com/styles/prosilver/theme/images/quote.gif Wikipedia wrote: In February 2013, observations using the NuSTAR satellite have found out that the central supermassive black hole of NGC 1365, measured to be about 2 million solar masses in...

https://i.imgur.com/NhoD7eB.png Why does the Milky Way look like an arch? Is it because the Earth is out of the galaxy plane? Or is it in some way due to the use of wide field cameras? It is like looking at a straight line on a dome. It is circling all around us, but we see a section that is above ...