Starship Asterisk*

Did the description say the North American continent can't form stars? I disagree. If we replace the word form for create, isn't Hollywood on the North American continent, and every year Hollywood creates 4 or 5 new stars. ( To replace old stars that retire such as Robert Redford or Meg Ryan.)

Oh yeah, it's Perseid shower time this weekend! Thanks for reminding me. As I grow older the calendar dates seem to swarm together in a meaningless mob. Another day just like thousands of others come before. By the way, I presume the meteors are the long streaks and the gamma rays are the sparkling ...

Puzzling. If this 100 light year wide nebula is a bright star forming region but as yet no stars have formed, wouldn't that really be astronomically rare in the universe? And if there are no bright stars within 100 light years, what is causing the central region to glow blue?

Makes me wonder with Halley's comment about a little patch being M13, what this looked like to Edmond Halley? The information says that this photo was taken by an 8 inch Newtonian. Now Newton had already invented the Newtonian by the turn of the century, they were small. Research told me that the fi...

When this happens to our Sun, which it will in ~5 billion years, I wonder if pictures of it will be pondered by 'people' on other worlds? I would think so. My great grandmother said to me in July 1969. "When she was born 75 years ago they were riding around by horse and buggy, and the Wright b...

Wow! What a great picture, Mr. Francisco Sojuel. For the first 5 seconds at least of clicking onto APOD I really thought it was Saturn! And which moon of Saturn I wondered had what looks like city lights?

BoJ wrote: ↑Thu Jul 28, 2022 8:18 am I always ask people about the direction of the rotation of the stars (and the Sun), so to the readers: Clockwise or counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere?

Every time lapse video of the star motion I've seen rotate counterclockwise around Polaris.

To my eyes it looks waning. Or didn't I find the right moon after all? It is - who said otherwise? Text says "a new moon will occur in three days" - i.e. it's waning. It looks like a waning crescent to be precise on its way to becoming a new moon. The text says the photo was taken in late...

I tried and failed to google the colour coding :( There's a description in the infrared link in the APOD explanation. But even that is confusing because they show two examples of the dog in infrared. The first one we are mostly familiar with from Flir cameras. The hottest light is the bright yellow...

thought exercise. This scene and location will no doubt will be a museum site in the distant future. Probably the MOST FAMOUS space museum in the Solar System. Whether it is 150 years in the future or 500 years. Tourist will flock there just like they flock to the Pyramids of Giza or to Mecca today....

Hi, At its closest approach to Earth, the comet was at a distance of 15 light-minutes (not 15 light-seconds), right? I believe you're right. If I recall a light second is approximately 300,000 kilometers. For easy calculation. From the Wikipedia article on PanStarrs; "and then on 14 July 2022,...

I am a bit confused. The Apod introduction states that the James Webb telescope can't see blue color, only up to orange. Yet the infrared picture of the nebula that Orin Stepanek posted and he attributed to the JWST still shows the blue portion of the nebula, although a little fainter, yet the orang...

Nice photo of the full Moon and the old castle, Mr. Petr Horalek. If I may make an assumption, this castle looks much more like Dracula's Castle (which is in Romania) than the actual Dracula's castle does. Just imagine the sound that night of all the wolves - and werewolves - out that night howling ...

Nice. What surprised me most is that the James Webb's images from its hexagonal mirrors still produces rectangular images with perfect 90 degree corners. Unlike my binoculars that has round lenses and it produces a round image. The explanation was for the old round camera lenses producing square ima...

Actually Andromeda is NOT the oldest thing I can see with the unaided eye.Where I live in Canada I can drive a hundred miles north to the Canadian Shield and they say that the rock cuts they cut out by the side of the road are up to 4 BILLION years old! (The rocks, not the cuts.)

Yes, great shot Tom Glenn. Just out of curiosity, is Tom Glenn any relation to astronaut John Glenn?

If I'm not mistaken, the dwarf planet Pluto if it was bright enough should also be there, far to the left of Saturn. This month all the planets are to one side of the sun. Any exoplanet hunter in the Alpha Centauri system should really see a big wobble of the Sun.

A leading theory for the origin of the Gum Nebula is that it is the remnant of a million year-old supernova explosion, while a competing theory holds that the Gum is a molecular cloud shaped over eons by multiple supernovas and the outflowings of several massive stars. What is the current status of...

What I find interesting is that there is some 3 light years of ambient interstellar dust surrounding the star that the light echo reflects off of but then there is no ambient interstellar dust 4 light years out. That's because since this echo began 20 years ago in 2002 shouldn't it have covered anot...

In the June 23, 2022 APOD of the Spiral Galaxy NGC 6744, there is a blue dot along the ~11:00 line moving away from the galaxy. Quite a few of the stars have a light blue color, but this star(?) has a distinctly different color (a darker blue) from all the others. What is it? and what gives it this...

Wow this is a revelation. Ann wrote that evidence suggests that Sadr is a little farther away than Deneb. Some websites I have seen need updating. Most state that Sadr is around 1,800 ly away while Deneb is some 2,600 ly away. Give or take 200 ly.

PlanetsfromChile__labelled_E-Schulz.jpg Nice line up of planets! 8-) What I find interesting is that they are in order of their solar orbits. How often does that happen? Apparently it is quite rare. According to space dot com, the last time this 5 planet line up happened in the correct order was Ma...

Ripe Berry (??what? In June?) John Yes. My parents used to grow strawberries in the garden. Shame I don't have them anymore, but usually about now in Ontario the strawberries would ripen by turning red by this week. In fact they taste much better as young June berries rather than when they get olde...

I'm amazed at how uniform the stars are in these galaxies. Usually on APOD we see classical galaxies which have multi colors. Usually a yellow/white core surrounded by arms that have sections with red new star formation areas here and there with other areas of hot blue young stars interspersed. Howe...

Your link doesn't actually give the distance of NGC 5195. According to the European Space Agency webpage, https://sci.esa.int/web/hubble/-/37004-the-whirlpool-galaxy-m51-and-companion-galaxy-ngc-5195 it says that the Whirlpool is 31 million light years away, and that NGC 5195 is passing BEHIND the W...