Starship Asterisk*

Man, what an experience to actually walk the edge of the crater on the moon!

Ann. Your story is prose, and yet the way it is written, it feels poetic.

Water is a very dense fluid - and even at slow speeds can cause a lot of damage. Air on Earth is less dense than water - it takes quite a bit of speed, upwards of 100mph to create significant damage. I wonder how fast the wind speeds would have to be on Mars to create anything significant enough to ...

At what point will we actually see the crescent of Venus? I have never seen it with my binoculars. I thought with a zoomed in image like this one - I might see it. I think right now, its not a crescent anyway - its a 3rd quarter phase. Does it need a specific zoom to see, does the brightness need to...

My other question now is: Doesn't betelgeuse spin? I wonder how they made sure that spinning didn't affect the image.

In section 5.3 of their document http://arxiv.org/pdf/0910.4167v2 they state that the limiting resolution they achieved is around 11 mas. T1, the northwestern of the two spots is around 11 mas wide. They state that they trust the size of this object. T2 on the other hand, the southeastern one, has a...

To me it still seems like a grid of around 3X7 pixels from the interferometry. Then it looks like it was digitally smoothed. So my question is this: How high do you think our resolution of the data in this image is? Reminds me of these images of Pluto. Not directly taken, but calculated. The brightn...

I'm willing to bet the visual patterns look like that just because that's how big the pixels are in our interferometry calculation. It looks to be 3 pixels wide and 7 pixels tall. The pixel grid is angled about 15 degrees from vertical. Probably because that's the direction the telescopes were tipped.

Looks like its my turn to say, "Hey star, nice name!"

It is a terrific image and must have taken a lot of patience by Dr Mellinger to stitch the over 3000 individual images together to produce the panorama. It therefore seems churlish of me to say that I prefer the image in the APOD of 2001 February 2 that was brought up through the "here" a...

I'm no fan of the cloudy nights we had here.

Thanks Chris, much appreciated.

Not being an astro photographer myself, it is difficult for me to have a point of reference.

After perusing our milky way images, it seems most are taken out in the middle of nowhere. Sahara Badlands Mauna Kea Devils Tower Sequoia National Park Well I suppose here's one with a foreground shot that's near a town http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080905.html This APOD is a lovely image, but ...

Chris Peterson wrote:Nevertheless, if you're in a dark location, an exposure long enough to bring out this type of sky leaves the foreground completely dark.

Got an example picture? I mean if the foreground for milky way pictures is not typically this bright, what is a typical brightness for a nearby foreground?

Yeah, I figured all the regulars around here DID know that. But no one had actually mentioned it in this thread, so I thought I'd mention it for the casual reader.

Of course the city is not actually putting out as much light as appears in the picture. The camera shutter is open for many seconds. The sky shows the Milky Way during those many seconds of exposure, and the ground shows the shadows of the nearby town after many seconds of exposure. The picture appe...

This summer I saw so many things with my binoculars, Neptune, Uranus, Jupiter's Moons, Andromeda Galaxy, that I looked at Saturn for its rings. I had tried and tried and failed, No wonder they weren't visible to my binoculars. Head on! Looks like i'll have to wait a year or so for better images of t...

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap090824.html Nice picture, but ... where's the astronomy? I've defended the choice of weather and atmospheric pictures before, even on flimsy grounds like "the air is what we look through to see the stars." But in this picture we're not even looking up to...

One way to tell a solid/liquid core would be to see how it 'wiggles' in its orbit. If the core is molten, then it is able to move around somewhat, affecting the mass distribution of the entire moon, which would create a wobble in its orbit. Another way might be to see the surface temperature of the ...

I usually get the impression that the skies are unchanging. Except for the planets, nothing seems to ever be different. But on the time-scale of astronomy these stars ARE mere young children. And these things do change. T Tauri stars are now generally recognized as young -- less than a few million y...

I ride my bike with sunglasses at all times for the same reason. When I rode I wore an open face helmet - hitting a (big) fly at 60mph stung a bit, and was fatal for the fly. What was really interesting was riding through a swarm of bees at that speed. Like Ralph Nader's Corvair, bees can be unsafe ...

I opened up Kstars for that night, July 11th (Actually July 12th) at around 2 AM local time. Copied a picture here. u Capricorn magnitude = 5.1 Neptune magnitude = 7.8 Jupiter magnitude = -2.6 Callisto magnitude = 5.7 The little blue dot below Neptune is NC 1408, a galaxy of some sort, I don't think...

Yeah, these definitely are the right distances to be Jupiter's moons. The four largest (Galilean) ones anyway. They are a significant angle away from Jupiter, and are quite a sight to see through binoculars. Night after night you can see their apparent positions change. If you don't have equipment t...

orin stepanek wrote:http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap090521.html

Actually; this APOD looks more like a horses head than does the Horsehead Nebula! 8)

Orin

The horsehead nebula looks more like a chess piece than a horse.

The picture is very surreal with Epimethius being crystal clear in focus and Titan in the back (seemingly out of focus) Though, I suspect this IS how titan looks when in focus - The image lengths are both pretty much the same at this point, infinity compared to the curvature of the camera. They shou...