Starship Asterisk*

Full Moon! Old middle European castle! It's pitchforks, burning torches, wood stakes and garlic time!
Yummy.

They look like sticks? They are neither brown nor sticky!

May I suggest an alternative way these were formed?

"Fulgarites" may form when lightning strikes the ground. Examples of Terrestrial fulgarites have a resemblance to what Curiosity has found on Mars:
John

Someone will correct me, but surely a "hoodoo" is formed where a harder rock preserves a column while the softer strata below are eroded away? The column is made of 'soft' rock, where if the suggested mechanism here is true, then the Martian column is harder rock! This being so, and unless...

OK, De28te, I bow to your horticultural knowledge. But which cultures cultivate strawberries? Although the genus is distributed world wide, the 'garden' strawberry is an 18th century hybrid from France (according to Wiki) and previous references were to the woodland strawberry, that has tiny fruit -...

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!! Not another named 'super' moon? But thank you, APoD, for making the point that a 'super' moon is not different to the unaided eye than any other full moon. But the website "Full Moon Nam...

From our resident astronomer, "a minor inconvenience to ground-based astronomy". While the IAU sets up the Centre for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky from Satellite Constellation Interference , in response to so much concern in the discipline. https://www.iau.org/science/scientifi...

Satellites? In a regular grid pattern?

Listen all you lunatics (that is, of course, students of the Moon. I mean no slur on your sanity) Do you not realise the damage that harping on about "Blood Moons" and all that does to weak minds? Have a look at this website, that of a new TV channel, published by the UK 's respected ITV (...

Yes, even the BBC Radio 4 News have been announcing the lunar eclipse, even though it's maximal at 0430 here. And announcing that it will be a 'blood' moon, and even worse a 'super-moon', "because it will appear larger than normal". D'ye see what all this fantasising and naming of moons is...

https://i.imgur.com/5WG4V7v.png Just 10 light-minutes? That's just a little bigger than the radius of the Earth's orbit around the Sun. That makes the ring itself roughly the size of the Mercury orbit. Ummmmmmmmmm! Space is awfully big etc. etc, but its darn sight bigger than that! Ten-light minute...

Ann, "Only ten light-minutes?" Messier 87, the subject of the previous Event Horizon Telescope exploit, has 65 Billion solar masses, whereas Sagittarius A* is less than 5 Million solar masses. So the latter has a much smaller accretion disc. All, On the image, that of M87 showed one side o...

The "Cosmic Web" is the term for the structure of the Universe in the highest scale we can imagine, a three dimensional network of galaxies. Lots of images online, so I won't put one up here. A YouTube channel, the SloMo Guys, specialises in slow motion photography, and in a recent video s...

Be honoured, Iaffaldeno!

As Oscar said, "“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.”

Indeed, orin! The very idea of linking your name with the other had not even dared to cross my mind!

But that 'atmosphere' effect as Phobos crosses past the sunspots. I've looked again and it is still there. Anyone else?
John

Orin, Not the first time that we have discussed the 'geography' (phobography?) of Phobos! There once was a prominent contributor here who used the name "craterchains". They believed that such formations on various moons and asteroids were evidence of interplanetary warfare in some previous...

Strange effect, as the rim of Phobos crosses the sunspots. As they appear from behind the moon (30-36 seconds in) they 'jump' as if the image was distorted by an atmosphere, that Phobos doesn't have!

Is this an artefact, or a real effect, and if so, why?
John

There IS a Hubble pic of Hoag: https://science.nasa.gov/hoags-object-n ... 76fabc8b1b

But it seems that it is 20 times further away than NGC 1512 (600 Miilion LY) so maybe even Hibble can't resolve it any better!
JOhn

A very similar galaxy, "Hoag's Object" has featured many times on APoD, most recently https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap191127.html I've never seen a picture of Hoag with as much resolution as this one. Has Hubble ever imaged Hoag? The structures seen within NGC1512 and the blurb (which I have ...

It's a complete coincidence (I think), but the Other Picture Of The Day, the Earth Science PoD, has this image:
It is a "Devil's Fingers" fungus!

Thank you, XgeoX! The idea of primitive, hill-billy stars out in the boondocks is intriguing! When looking at a galaxy's portrait, I always wonder what the view would be in a planet's sky, and if there might be anyone to see it. From what you say, despite the age of halo stars, the lack of heavy ele...

This pic shows especially well that a galaxy isn't a neat and tidy spiral. Many pics of other galaxies suggest a cloud of stars, relatively disorganised, around the main structure, but not as clearly as this. So the Milky Way will have a shell of stars. Do we know this, or only infer it? John

The blurb for this APoD says, "The resulting image taken by Webb's NIRcam demonstrates their precise alignment is the best physics will allow." The link in that sentence takes you to a previous APoD that describes "adaptive optics" on an Earthbound telescope, that is just not re...

The blurb for this APoD says, "The resulting image taken by Webb's NIRcam demonstrates their precise alignment is the best physics will allow." The link in that sentence takes you to a previous APoD that describes "adaptive optics" on an Earthbound telescope, that is just not rel...

Eh? You are " discussing nothing here but our universe. No others. " But Chris, you said/wrote, " And indeed, there are observable universes with no contents at all in common." Where are they, how can you observe them? You cannot be referring to the Universes observed by you and ...