Starship Asterisk*

Ron-Astro Pharmacist wrote:
I think these are just upside down trees like Ann's giraffe.

Plants have a quite a different symmetry than animals. Makes you wonder we differ so much?

Will our first encounter with alien life be vegetable rather than animal? Friendly or dangerous.

http://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/the-sagan-file/ wrote:
<<In a Scientific American article, [Carl Sagan] wrote, “If a silicon-based giraffe had walked by the Viking Mars landers, its portrait would have been taken.” Sagan didn’t actually think there might be silicon Martian giraffes, but he was glad that the Viking landers would be ready to take pictures of any animals bounding around.

Here’s a 1981 letter from Sagan to someone who thought alien life forms would be very much like creatures on Earth. Sagan disagreed: “We have a worrisome tendency to think that what we see is all that can be… But why five fingers? Why fingers rather than tentacles? Why the agonizingly slow data processing in our neurological systems? Why not multi-spectral infrared sensing? It’s easy to think of a wide range of anatomies, physiologies and sensory modalities that have not been adopted by humans or indeed by any other creatures on the Earth.”

Art wrote:
Camelopardalis is relatively big...but not too bright

Source: http://jocelyndelhotalgiraffes.blogspot ... story.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namib-Naukluft_National_Park wrote:
<<The Namib-Naukluft National Park is a national park of Namibia encompassing part of the Namib Desert (considered the world's oldest desert) and the Naukluft mountain range. With an overall area of 49,768 km² larger than Switzerland, the Namib-Naukluft is the largest game park in Africa. A surprising collection of creatures survives in the hyper-arid region, including snakes, geckos, unusual insects, hyenas, gemsboks and jackals.>>

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadvlei wrote:

[b][color=#0000FF][size=150]550 year old dead trees in Dooie Vlei[/size][/color][/b]

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<<Deadvlei is a white clay pan located near the more famous salt pan of Sossusvlei, inside the Namib-Naukluft Park in Namibia. Also written DeadVlei or Dead Vlei, its name means "dead marsh". The pan also is referred to as "Dooie Vlei" which is the (presumably original) fully Afrikaans name.

Dead Vlei has been claimed to be surrounded by the highest sand dunes in the world, the highest reaching 300-400 meters (350m on average, named "Big Daddy" or "Crazy Dune"), which rest on a sandstone terrace.

The clay pan was formed after rainfall, when the Tsauchab river flooded, creating temporary shallow pools where the abundance of water allowed camel thorn trees to grow. When the climate changed, drought hit the area, and sand dunes encroached on the pan, which blocked the river from the area.

The trees died, as there no longer was enough water to survive. There are some species of plants remaining, such as salsola and clumps of !nara, adapted to surviving off the morning mist and very rare rainfall. The remaining skeletons of the trees, which are believed to have died 600-700 years ago (AD 1340- 1430), are now black because the intense sun has scorched them.Though not petrified, the wood does not decompose because it is so dry.>>

Beyond wrote:

Ann wrote:
Giraffes aside, this is a gorgeous image.

Ann, Giraffes are big animals. They have to be 'aside',
(or upside down, as in your earlier post) or they'd block most of your view of the image.

• Camelopardalis is relatively big...but not too bright:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camelopardalis wrote:

[b][color=#0000FF][size=150]H. A. Rey's method of forming Camelopardalis[/size][/color][/b]

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<<Although Camelopardalis is the 18th largest constellation, it is not a particularly bright constellation; in fact, it only contains four stars above magnitude 5.0.

The space probe Voyager 1 is moving in the direction of Camelopardalis [having been deflected out of the plane of the ecliptic by a south polar flyby of Saturn] though it will not be nearing any of the stars in this constellation for many thousands of years.

The constellation was created by Petrus Plancius in 1613 to represent the animal Rebecca rode to marry Isaac in the Bible. Johannes Hevelius gave it the official name of "Camelopardus" or "Camelopardalis" because he saw the constellation's many faint stars as the spots of a giraffe. The word camelopardalis comes from Latin, and it is the romanisation of the Greek "καμηλοπάρδαλις" meaning "giraffe", from "κάμηλος" (kamēlos), "camel" + "πάρδαλις" (pardalis), "leopard", due to its having a long neck like a camel and spots like a leopard.

Part of the constellation was hived off to form the constellation Sciurus Volans, the Flying Squirrel, by William Croswell in 1910. However this was not taken up by later cartographers.>>

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Arctic_camel wrote:

[b][color=#0000FF]Camel humps may have evolved as an adaptation in a cold climate.[/color][/b]

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<<The High Arctic camel, from the mid-Pliocene epoch, is a fossil camel related to the fossil genus Paracamelus from which modern camels arose. It is also related to the extinct Ice Age Yukon giant camel. Collagen-containing fossils were found in 2006 near Strathcona Fiord on Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, Canada.

The High Arctic camel lived at least 3.4 million years ago during a warmer period in a boreal-type forest environment. Paleoenvironmental reconstruction shows that in the mid-Pliocene the camel would have been living in a landscape that supported a boreal-type forest, dominated by larch trees. At the time, global temperatures are estimated to have been 2 to 3 degrees warmer than today, whereas locally, in the Strathcona Fiord area, temperatures would have been 14–22°C warmer. Mean annual temperature would have been around freezing, with cold and snowy winters.>>

Ann wrote:Giraffes aside, this is a gorgeous image.

Ann

NCTom wrote:In looking at the LMC (I also learned it as the GMC 50 years ago!), is the bright spot on the upper left hand side a Milky Way star or is the Tarantula Nebula really big enough to be that visible in this photo?

Ann wrote:

Nitpicker wrote:Not bad at all. [joke] Just needs a few giraffes shopped into the frame. [/joke]

Camelopardalis?

Ann

Nitpicker wrote:Not bad at all. [joke] Just needs a few giraffes shopped into the frame. [/joke]