Starship Asterisk*

The Great Conjunction of 2020 will be visible just after sunset on Dec 21, low on the western horizon. Both planets will be well past their annual oppositions with Earth and Sun, and well past their annual periods of retrograde motion. But this is a fun web page to play with: https://www.heavens-abo...

Great pic!

I saw a (sadly cropped) version of this in the news the other day, along with a bit more of the back story:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02-15/ ... d/10803300

Getting the itch to take more lunar images, but only seeing clouds right now ... so I've been sharpening up my processing skills on some old moon videos I recorded in 2014. Two of these were recorded with my Nikon D5100 DSLR, which yields an (unimpressively large) effective pixel size of 12 microns ...

Hi Ann,

This is what was in your sky view at 06:00 local time (05:00 UT) today (about 1 hour 20 minutes before sunrise):
Jupiter and Antares were both well and truly up, but low in the sky. They both rose between 03:30 and 04:00 local time.

Does this help?

Part of my bias against supermoons is because they are the only ones that don't fully fit on the sensor of my DSLR when attached to my telescope. And the best thing about micromoons is that they are only ever a fortnight away from a super new moon. My favourite full moon is a few hours from perfectl...

I think the "next year" was recycled from 27-Dec-2015:
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap151227.html

So, I think we can now rule out all of 2015 to 2018.

But it sure is a different image in today's APOD. Nice processing, geck.

I agree. I think the news article incorrectly used "in" instead of "from". The actual weather report -- https://mars.nasa.gov/insight/weather/ -- just says "wind direction", which has probably been misinterpreted by the author of the news article.

I did ponder that (and nearly asked the question because of the ambiguous wording in the news article) but decided that the Mars weather service would probably be using the common definition of wind direction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_direction Wind direction is reported by the direction f...

And InSight is only 4.5 degrees north of the Martian equator, very much in the tropics.

I don't suppose the balmy south-westerly winds would feel like much at this spot (or any spot) on Mars.

Striking a balance between my enthusiasm for lunar photography and my opinion that supermoons are overly hyped, here is a cropped, hand-held snapshot of last night's supermoon, through a 300 mm lens, taken just before bed.

Hello I submit you this Tycho's picture. Very little time in a life the sky allows in the Rhône valley in France to exploit almost fully the capabilities of large telescopes like my newton 24" that I built. It lasted 20 minutes on the night of February 15. I was able to image some craters like...

My first time out with camera(s) on the 6" scope for almost two years. I was eventually happy with the result, but really struggled to remember how to do it all.

I'd like to offer my thanks to all the humans who made possible the twin robotic Martian geologists, Spirit and Opportunity, and who provided us with so many wonderful images and scientific results. It is a great time to be alive.

Pluto was a planet in 1990 (but too dim for the camera, out of frame on left). These days it is just a planet.

It was almost three years ago that I made my comments, but I will repeat that I am not at all concerned with why most "world maps" show a bit more of the northern hemisphere than the southern (there are doubtless a number of reasons, good and bad). I simply think that one of the consequenc...

That's a beautiful song and video, Art, thanks. I won't even deduct marks for the superimposed moon at the end.

JohnD wrote: ↑Tue Feb 12, 2019 8:05 am No sensible answer to my above Q.
I repeat; is UT a snapshot of a body coming together or flying apart?
J.

Nobody knows. But if you extend the time frame back enough and forward enough, it would probably be true.

Very nice. But the caption gets the sequence a little out of order. The Moon set about six hours later. (It would need to be a very young, slender, crescent Moon to set so soon after sunset.) Edit: On second thought, it is pretty mountainous in Valais. Maybe the Moon did set behind a mountain shortl...

The derivation by Weisskopf "only" purports to give limits within an order of magnitude. (At least that's how I read it.)

I can look skinny in the right lighting, too.

I wonder what Earth would look like under a similar radar scan. Perhaps adjusting the “color” to something more Terran like blue/green. I imagine it would look exactly like a topographic map of Earth (i.e. showing the elevations) with a resolution of 100 to 150m. Here is another topographic map of ...

I am not sure there are definitive claims that Australian Aborigines were the first astronomers, but they have been described as such. Given that the cultures of these diverse groups were maintained through millennia, almost entirely as spoken stories, and given their tragic recent history since Eur...

Fantastic. I enjoyed the "first astronomers" article, too (resolved to look at the three brothers in their fishing canoe, this evening).

Similar effect seen here, sans flowers or leaves:

I don't suppose the scattering effect would appear much different if the kiawe tree was in full bloom, or not. But I certainly don't think the whiter parts of the tree in the APOD are all kiawe flowers. Indeed, I think they are predominantly leaves.