Starship Asterisk*

It's best not to use hugely famous asterisms. Even if they are upside down. http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap060317.html I'm the best part of intoxicated and I found that in around a minute of searching. Without any intent to offend you, I think that was way too easy. With this in mind I will waiv...

With all due respect, neufer, can you not involve your local politics in a completely unrelated thread? We've run our course, we have a winner, there's no need to be posting at all.

Sodium is sat at the bar by the harbour. He says to his friend "I'm sure I've lost Chlorine". His friend replies "Are you sure, old salt?" Sodium replies "I'm positive". You never have clear skies on a moonless night as there is not enough lunar radiation to clear the c...

Do some simple mathematics. Galaxies rotate as a unit (thanks, dark matter halo), so we can get angular velocity just from the radius and the rotational period. The Milky Way rotates once every 200 million years (give or take) and it's 50,000 light years in radius. This means a star on the outer edg...

Sure: The first stellar black hole ever discovered, Cygnus X-1 is a young blue star in orbit around a black hole. If you want to go hardcore into it, PSR J0737-3039 is a binary pulsar system, with two pulsars in mutual orbit. A similar system (a pulsar around a neutron star), PSR B1913+16, was used ...

No idea on the average spacing, but population III stars were quite odd to anyone who has a vague understanding of the various fusion processes. A "normal" O or B class hydrogen fusing star uses the CNO cycle, a process involving catalysis by carbon, nitrogen and oxygen. However, these ele...

A winner is owlice!

Your turn to post the next one.

Would not most of this material eventually fall back to Earth, Yes, most models show over 80% of ejecta falling back to Earth. This is why the Moon has such a low density and low mass. be collected at Lagrangian points It would need to reach escape velocity to reach any of the Earth-Sun Lagrangian ...

Go back to your previous guess, Amir.

You don't really need to know what it is (though knowing what it is will help you search APOD's archives), to win all you have to do is link to the right APOD.

Amir wrote:what? you mean a star forming region? (i'm probably wrong again! ;D)

You are very close, Amir.

No, it's not a clue. But this is: It's at the opposite end to Amir's guess.

Not even close, I'm afraid.

I find it highly unlikely that the two events were related. First off, meteors burn up in the mesosphere, which is around 100km up. Satellites are usually at least 400km (LEO) and quite often much higher. Secondly "almost the same instance" isn't good enough. They'd peak together with abso...

If I saw something like this through my telescope, I'd be wondering what's in the local water.

I've seen enough smudgy blobs with faint companions to know that one looks much like the other.

Judging from the ratio of brightnesses and limiting my search to within the solar system, that's either Pluto and Charon (Unlikely, Charon would be brighter) or Earth and Luna.

I'd consider it a blog. It updates regularly with new content often relating to relevant news, sometimes factual and sometimes opinion, and promotes its author's activities. It isn't in the traditional blog format but there are quite a few blogs which defy the Blogger/Wordpress standard. The only pa...

Those of you analysing cloud formations are completely ignoring that the window reflections are superimposed atop of the distant clouds. So of course you will see clouds through them and, the reflection being transparent, it will appear to be "behind" clouds.

It's certainly a reflection train from a double glazed window. If you get the angles right, you can reflect six or more images of the Sun or Moon using such windows and they're perfectly visible to the naked eye. What you end up with are multiple images, each spaced slightly closer to the last. This...

It seems that lower levels are calm, so the hexagonal ice plates fall parallel to the ground. As we get higher, there's a slight wind so the plates are wobbling and not always parallel to the ground. This causes the pillars to spread.

A cosmologist is often wrong, but never in doubt. It's a famous quote and it makes a cosmologist the opposite to a priest, who is never wrong but often in doubt. Experimental value is limited by the theory in use. If I use Newtonian dynamics, my error margins for a falling object will be larger than...

When similar processes shape these things, similar results emerge even though the two objects are utterly unrelated. Compare a dolphin with a shark. They look similar, yet a dolphin has no relation to the shark whatsoever. Evolution was working with similar environments, so resulted with a similar c...

It's lighting and perception.

We're used to seeing lighting from above and indeed our brains are hardwired to interpret unknown lighting as being from above, since the sun is never below the observer in normal circumstances.

Simply flip the image 180 degrees and you'll see concave craters.

Any update on this, Dan (or indeed anyone else)?

I sure can. http://runesource.cjb.net/junk/mk050412ut102255aarrowed.jpg The one above is labelled, the one below is a reference image taken around the same time. Note the "star" is missing. http://nightskylive.net/mk/mk050412/mk050412ut101105a.jpg There's nothing evident on frames before o...