Starship Asterisk*

The photo of the sun looks like a (colored) negative. The sun should look darker around the edges.

Beautiful galaxy! How similar to the Milky Way is it, ignoring the size difference? Is there a galaxy that better illustrates what the Milky Way looks like? The renderings used to show what the Milky Way looks like always bother me since they are so fake looking - better to use a picture of a real ...

Beautiful galaxy! How similar to the Milky Way is it, ignoring the size difference? Is there a galaxy that better illustrates what the Milky Way looks like? The renderings used to show what the Milky Way looks like always bother me since they are so fake looking - better to use a picture of a real g...

Did the author of The Martian know the coordinates looked like this, and did he pick the spot for a reason? The soil there does look about right to grow potatoes.

Any quick/sloppy guesstimates on the odds that an appreciable quantity of sub-surface water on Enceladus has NOT been through a life-killing cycle of eruption and expulsion? That strikes me as the key question. I.e. to what degree does Enceladus‘ cryovolcanic activity function as an efficient water...

Again, hang on! All this talk of light that is 1.5, 2 or 2.5 (various figures quoted) the radius of the Event Horizon, "will be sucked in!!!" The Event Horizon is the Event Horizon - that is the distance from the BH itself at which, thanks to the gravity well, escape velocity equals light...

What I don't understand (one of many, actually) is why do the radio observations need to be taken at practically the exact same time to be successfully combined? Doesn't the black hole look basically the same even a few hours later? And the radio waves detected at different radio dishes are not nece...

According to the "EHT" link in the last sentence of the APOD caption: [1] The shadow of a black hole is the closest we can come to an image of the black hole itself, a completely dark object from which light cannot escape. The black hole’s boundary — the event horizon from which the EHT t...

RocketRon wrote: ↑Thu Apr 11, 2019 5:01 am Thats awesome.

But would it be being difficult to ask how it is that radio telescopes can 'see' or resolve such stuff,
at the minute angles and immense distances that this is being observed at ?

This video should help.

"Eta Carinae may be about to explode. But no one knows when - it may be next year, it may be one million years from now."

What about this year? Are scientists able to rule that out?

Amazing images!

How much higher resolution will we see?
And I thought they knew where and how the red color forms..?

If the dusty tails of comets get blown away with the solar wind, how is it that the "dust" from these comets orbit long term? Shouldn't the debris left from comets (and asteroids) be called sand and pebbles? It doesn't get "blown away" in the short term. Depending on the dynamic...

If the dusty tails of comets get blown away with the solar wind, how is it that the "dust" from these comets orbit long term? Shouldn't the debris left from comets (and asteroids) be called sand and pebbles?

BDanielMayfield wrote: ↑Sat Jan 05, 2019 3:07 pm
Well that's a bit surprising Chris. There doesn't appear to be any green or blue at all...

There IS some blue in the lower-right corner...
But seriously, it does look too red. Maybe it's to honor the Communist Party?

My question about the launch referenced in the featured photo seems to have stirred up quite the 'discussion'. I didn't mean for it to escalate into any kind of flame war. Anyway, thanks for all the info. It does look like the NASA caption for the photo is incorrect. They say, "A new chapter in...

Is today's APOD photoshopped? How would I know? More importantly, does it matter if the picture is photoshopped? In my opinion, no. The story is clear enough. In the beginning, NASA made a lot of beginner's mistakes. Then NASA learned how to do it, with a few very regrettable misses. Ann Thanks for...

Also, is this the launch of Bumper 2, or Bumper 8? According to a nasa.gov site (https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_765.html) this is Bumper 2. On the other hand, wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTV-G-4_Bumper) has a table listing Bumper 8 as the first launch from Cape Ca...

It looks photoshopped. Seriously. I'm not a forensic photo expert, but there is a lighter line that extends down and to the right from the pole that is next to the exhaust plume. At first I thought it was sunlight streaming through the scaffolding, but there is no corresponding shadows from the scaf...

RS Puppis is a 9.2 M ☉ supergiant [whose] spectral type varies between F9 and G7 as its temperature changes. ...Stars with at least 9 M ☉ (possibly as much as 12 M ☉ ) evolve in a complex fashion, progressively burning heavier elements at hotter temperatures in their cores. The star becomes layered...

Is there a clear time lapse movie of the light echos?

Here's a 2D simulation. It looks pretty much like the 3D, with plenty of apparent chains and other patterns. And it is truly random data, not even pseudorandom from an algorithm. The values are generated from random radio noise in the atmosphere. How do you know the radio noise is truly random? The...

Astronymus wrote: ↑Mon Aug 27, 2018 4:52 pm I bet there is a flat earth explanation for this.

I'm no Flat Earther, ( ) but I'm pretty sure most of the curvature is due to the wide angle lens.

BTW, didn't there used to be an emoji that was nauseous? If so, what happened to it?

As this is kind of fun, I thought I would chime in... Tangent function on a line same tangent function randomly spun. 1 and 2. I was trying to create a galaxy. 8-) :lol2: these are 3D in 2d images... there is a length and depth... some dots would be further away from you... From any angle and view ...

Beautiful sight! I've noted this before, but I will again - there are many star 'chains' visible. More than chance should produce, I think. I even made a simulation of random stars by sprinkling black pepper on a blank paper, and only saw two or three chains of 'stars' out of thousands of ground pep...

Boomer12k wrote: ↑Sat Aug 18, 2018 7:46 pm At first I thought it was a Sun, with some planet representations...glad I read the caption.

Quite the contrast...

:---[===] *

No offense, but I thought of this... a snippet of a joke by Brian Regan, one of the best observational comedians.