Starship Asterisk*

This is a false color image where the blue channel was indeed photographed through a blue filter, but the green channel is really red data and the red channel is infrared data. Photography specifics here: https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/potw1118a/ Also, the Hubble itself was apparently rotated...

Pictures like this are puzzling because they appear static. The reality is that everything is orbiting Saturn from left to right. Particles at the top of the picture are moving a little faster, those near the bottom are moving a little slower. Particles above the gap are overtaking Daphnis, and par...

It's pretty impressive to show so clearly the hydrogen features that the red plates from the POSS II DSS only show the barest hint of, and only then when pushed beyond any reasonable limits. I sense you've compressed a monstrous dynamic range into the result. Not bad - it looks pretty natural. -Noel

Images like this sure make you want to believe the atmosphere is thicker than what has been reported.

-Noel

I think the phrase "dirty snowball" ought to be revised to "gnarly snowball".

-Noel

Sorry, looks like it was me who had the short between the headsets today. I got to the image by having been told the color was wrong by a friend, and just assumed it was today's. Then I realized I'd already seen it without having double-checked whether it was today's. Duhhhhh. It's been that kind of...

Today, August 18, we see a repeat of the July 9 rendition of the yellow star Sadr in blue. Might not have noticed it otherwise.

Do I hear some grinding in the cogs of the machinery? Or someone asleep at the switch?



-Noel

<in my best Yoda voice>

Blue Sadr is not. False color this is, hm?

-Noel

What fun!

Training aside, I wonder how long it takes to get used to how different everything is in a zero-G environment.

-Noel

You're right, of course about the declination difference being the same everywhere. I had crossed up my RA and Dec when imaginin' lines in the sky...

I wus overthinkin' it. No horse sense.

-Noel

Same math but I used the Wikipedia size: 8 × 6 arcmins and assumed that "nose" to "mane" was the 8 arcmins. An astronomer friend of mine once let on that pretty much all measurements in the cosmos are quite inexact - essentially best guesses. That said, I just retraced my steps....

Can someone tell me the size of the Horsehead Nebula? Excerpted from my book, Star Vistas : To give you a sense of scale, the size of the horse "head" itself from the tip of the "nose" to "mane" is about 1.5 light-years, which is about 1,000 times the diameter of the o...

Thank you for the explanation, Rob. I hope you will grow to understand that my comment/criticism was meant constructively. And I do realize the difficulties in assembling images from widely varying data sources. I'm sorry I misinterpreted your difficulties in assembly as an attempt to de-emphasize t...

What a beautiful nebula when shown in all its full extent. Wow. I have a question though... What's making it greenish, just above center? Green is so uncommon in astronomy, that this really jumps out at me. And with all due respect to Mr. Gendler, I believe he may have de-emphasized the stars a bit ...

The Monkey Head Nebula in Orion. Made up of NGC 2174, NGC 2175, and some others. North is down in this image. This full color composite was created from Infrared, Red, and Blue plates on file in the STScI Digitized Sky Survey online database. The Monkey Head Nebula in Orion http://Noel.ProDigitalSof...

From the evening of March 16, over south Florida...
-Noel

LOL, Art. To this day our highly practiced non-rythmic walks are often mistaken for intoxication.

-Noel

they remind me of Malted Milk Balls, if you've eaten one you'll know what i mean. We now have more incentive to go :-) I'd be okay with that. Malted Milk Ball mine for food: Check. Ice mine for water: Check. Probably have to bring some air is all. These things seem to be in a solid matrix, partiall...

The more I ponder magnetism, the stranger it seems. Like it was added to the laws of physics by someone different than was responsible for the main set.

-Noel

Very nice drawing, but some of what it implies is even more interesting... He has a 40 inch telescope with optics good enough to see the central star of the Ring, under skies dark enough and with enough light gathering ability to sense color in the Ring, and finally, the ability to be comfortable fo...

Warning: You WILL get chills while watching this.

http://vimeo.com/47008527

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-Noel

Oh, and by the way, a more appropriate and gentle response to "Tell me this is not the best image this lander can produce!!" might have been to point out that much higher resolution images ARE being obtained, for example: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/images/pia16051_figure_1_raw_smaller-full.j...

Personally, I think anybody who isn't blown away by an image like this should just shoot themselves, because they have no real sense of wonder left. What's amazing about the image isn't its abstract quality, but what we are actually seeing! Thank you for the suggestion, Chris. But I think I'll just...

It was on the TV news. Now how many have seen the - oh I don't know - Farmer's insurance commercial where all the agents are on a roof? Or the Cadillac commercial where they're driving on a twisty mountain road? Probably 95%. A better question: Given the poor quality of this image, why would anyone ...

It's hard to imagine that they couldn't think to leave the camera design to the last possible minute. Hell, they could have put a consumer dSLR in a box of lead glass and done way better than this. Don't laugh, a dSLR in a box is how red light traffic cameras are implemented. Limitations on the data...