Starship Asterisk*

[...] Interesting… not even the enlarged Hubble image is sharp or detailed enough for me to notice any individual clusters, especially around the part that Webb zoomed in on. But maybe that’s just me. Are you sure you aren’t comparing Hubble’s entire image to the close up from Webb? Yes. That is re...

I suppose the Sun has no meaningfully permanent longitude map that would allow these two coronal un-wrappings to be matched up. Which makes sense since the Sun is just a ball of plasma! But I gather that the rotational north-south pole line should remain the same long term. Or does it? I know the r...

I suppose the Sun has no meaningfully permanent longitude map that would allow these two coronal un-wrappings to be matched up. Which makes sense since the Sun is just a ball of plasma! But I gather that the rotational north-south pole line should remain the same long term. Or does it? I know the r...

I found a diagram that applies to the high temperature, high pressure scenario of a supernova: https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQnOo5HRQcWqFvAXdS870Vf-ti_vF8V-dRXI2NtzzZ-fw&s Source: https://isnap.nd.edu/assets/250195/radioactivity_lecture_10.pdf I think I get it… still, wh...

With a temperature near 200,000 K, WD J005311 is the hottest star known. The extreme properties of the central star are being powered by the residual radioactive decay of ⁵⁶Ni, where the usual half-life of 6.0 days from electron capture is increased to many centuries due to the nickel being complet...

More important still might be the way that the bar, specifically the dust lanes in the bar, feed gas into the central black hole of a barred galaxy. By what mechanism? Is the dust and gas in the bar so dense it behaves like a viscous liquid, resulting in particles losing energy and spiraling inward...

This is how the center of NGC 1365 works: https://asterisk.apod.com/download/file.php?id=49106&mode=view Optical image of NGC 1365 from the Dark Energy Survey (left). Credit: Schinnerer et al. 2023 Ann so a bar in a barred galaxy is a pair of wide and slightly curved jets flowing to the ring-sh...

Under clear skies, the sky is almost the same blue anywhere, opposite the Sun or right next to the Sun. The color of the Sun itself (and therefore the direct light it casts) is filtered towards yellow/orange/red by the scattering away of blue. the sky of Sunset at Cerro Armazones, 360° Panorama htt...

This is how the center of NGC 1365 works: https://asterisk.apod.com/download/file.php?id=49106&mode=view Optical image of NGC 1365 from the Dark Energy Survey (left). Credit: Schinnerer et al. 2023 Ann so a bar in a barred galaxy is a pair of wide and slightly curved jets flowing to the ring-sh...

I wonder if this deep sky APOD contains any coincidences with the constellation art of old.

Interstellar dust is "brown" (low saturation red/orange) because of the nature of the silicates and carbonates that make it up. I think the scatter is primarily Rayleigh scattering off of very tiny particles and gas molecules, in which case the forward and back scatter are symmetric, and ...

Interstellar dust is "brown" (low saturation red/orange) because of the nature of the silicates and carbonates that make it up. I think the scatter is primarily Rayleigh scattering off of very tiny particles and gas molecules, in which case the forward and back scatter are symmetric, and ...

https://images.fineartamerica.com/images-medium-large-5/a-wide-field-view-over-the-pleiades-roberto-colombari.jpg https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0911/california7_andreo.jpg Ann I made an attemt to subtract the general galactic illumination on the dust Wide field Pleiades with light brown dust bun...

what the Great Red Spot of Jupiter was in fact slightly yellowish light gray?

just imagine the huge plane through the two parallel terminator lines!
Still Saturn's rings are even larger

I wonder if the 3d and 4th crescents are shown in the wrong order

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/6dtzfW6FO8I/maxresdefault.jpg Ann I was intrigued with colour-coding here and googled. it's heliocentric distance: blue=closer, red=distant Orphan stream (colour coded red to orange) is 20 kly long so I guess it is outside the disk. I wonder if any blue-coded streams are insi...

https://www.esa.int/var/esa/storage/images/esa_multimedia/images/2018/04/gaia_s_sky_in_colour2/17475368-10-eng-GB/Gaia_s_sky_in_colour_pillars.jpg One more thing. We are used to seeing pictures of spiral galaxies where the (typically blue) arms have been made to look brighter than they are, compare...

Ann wrote: ↑Wed Dec 27, 2023 7:00 pm

The Milky Way in Sagittarius. Note the bright yellow light from the bulge of the Milky Way. It seems highly likely that this bright yellow light dominates the overall color of the Milky Way, and that the Milky Way is a relatively yellow galaxy. Credit: Terrence Dickinson.

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Ann

But what if the Milky Way in Sagittarius is in fact the core looming from both sides of the disk? It would not be fair then to attribute all that yellow to the whole galaxy

here are my 5 layman's constellations

I'm assuming that the imager's stated time of 18:52 is his local time, CST (or 17:52 UT), which is what I'm basing my calculation on. FWIW, the mountain is 70 km from the basilica, and about 3000 m higher. So there's no way at all the Moon could be 9° above the horizon. 3 km / 70 km = tg 2.5° ok, t...

after subtracting the blue shine (rgb = 45 64 91) there are some stars in the sky, probably not visible without a telescope Cathedral, Mountain, Moon-black.jpg I think the near total absence of stars is largely explained because we are looking through hundreds of kilometers of atmosphere within jus...

after subtracting the blue shine (rgb = 45 64 91) there are some stars in the sky, probably not visible without a telescope

Double checked the ephemeris. Taking the location as Turin (because it's in the list, and only a few miles away), 15 Dec 2023, 18:52 local, I get the Moon at 2° above the horizon, the Sun at 21° below the horizon, Moon at 10% waxing. I am feeling lost. Is Stellarium so unprecise? Is using "loc...

This is a 10% Moon that is 2° above the horizon. The Sun is 21° below the horizon, so just out of astronomical twilight and it should not be contributing significant light. I would be curious to know the technical details of the image. I don't think it could be achieved without some kind of HDR pro...