Starship Asterisk*

I have to say, the video animation simply left me speechless. APOD occasionally has run video clips, and that would be a great one.

Nice APOD, but I was extremely disappointed that it's been cloudy here for the last week, so I haven't gotten to see the conjunction myself yet, and the moon's moving out of the picture.

Stupid clouds.

Right. It's an embedded youtube video of the meteor as seen from the camera on a police cruiser.

Most likely you either don't have flash installed or it's blocked, such as by a filter on the internet connection at work or by ad-blocking software.

If you look closely at the two crater pairs near the upper left of center of the image, you'll notice they are the same two craters - not similar, but exactly the same. Dave, I'm not sure I see the pair you're talking about. Is it the large pair near the horizon, each on what looks like a smooth pl...

Heh, somehow astronauts drinking their own "urine" is overshadowing this news. Sigh. I agree with your sentiment, but it also bothers me when people say they're drinking their own urine. In that case, everyone had better think really long and hard about where the water they drink comes fr...

The Economist http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12592240 (of all magazines) has an article in today's issue on the three planets of HR 8799. I also suspect we'll consider this photo http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080919.html to be the first visual photograph of a planet...

Hello Chris, It's unimaginable to me that so much power and concentrated energy can be produced by anything just by the acretion of surrounding matter. It wound appear to be not a slow process at all to effect such an enormous generation of power especially considering the distances involved. Extre...

No microbes. That wasn't in Phoenix's job description. It could have potentially, but didn't, find miscellaneous hints of past life, like methane or calcium carbonate. It did find some minerals of the sort that would be favorable to plant life. There were two TEGA ovens that never received samples, ...

NEO says objects like this strike several times per year. They also have a very detailed article about the detection, predictions, and observations, including a shot from a weather satellite that detected the event: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/2008tc3.html It's the objects in or near the Kuiper bel...

Does anyone have any idea what the small white bump on Jupiter's limb is (~ 7 o' clock)? Maybe a tall cloud system? A few more tidbits about adaptive optics...typically they aren't put on the primary mirror a telescope...way too big to big practical. Rather they're one of the secondary mirrors or l...

I see a couple things that could potentially be craters, but really the landscape is so distorted I wouldn't try to say for certain. Enceladus isn't completely devoid of craters, by the way. It's just that it's surface is active enough that it tends to cover them over in relatively short time period...

Read The Electric Sky and then get back to me, and don't accuse me of being ignorant of mainstream science, cause I'm not. Electrical Theory is not non-science ! I will not pay money to an author who makes misleading implications about things like the evidence for stellar fusion or the postulations...

That's generally true, but I've also seen Kovil participate quite reasonably in the discussion around here, and educating those who are willing to genuinely consider the arguments against nutty theories, which to laymen are often very difficult to assess, is often worthwhile. Insults typically breed...

The huge mountain on Mars and the great canyon both resemble what one might expect from an interplanetary plasma discharge without the need for an ad hoc explanation that it was due to volcanoes and water erosion. Plus we have records from ancient people of Mars's girth being slashed by Venus's swo...

Do you really want to know what I think? ... that the corkscrew galaxy has its blue star regions stimulated to being so blue in color from the intense electrical activity that is flowing along the corkscrew path and electrically overstressing those stars, who are responding by intensly shining in '...

What's with the postal code, age, and gender questions at the beginning? Either looking for categorical biases or checking to see how representative the respondants are of a cross section of society. I just took it, but I have to admit, I felt a little bad giving my honest impression that the red z...

orin stepanek wrote:

bystander wrote:Actually, it would be Neptune. Pluto is no longer a planet.

Pluto will always be a planet in my book. So is Ceres; Sedna; etc. 8)

Orin

Hmmm...do you two know each other?

Jovian doesn't exclusively refer to Jupiter, but in fact is sometimes used to categorize gas giants. Confusing, I know.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_giant

Well if you think about it, part of the reason paint or dye drops in water can form the enrapturing patterns they do is because the density is approximately the same, so the dye moves through the water as though it were...weightless. And of course, this nebula is in deep space where for all practica...

The Jules Verne capsule isn't designed as a permanent addition to the station. It's also extra mass and drag with minimal utility. However, it works great for bringing waste from the ISS to a controlled re-entry, which is something that has to be done. At the same time, ESA has a program to investig...

Nice find neufer. Even more impressive than the 135 foot diameter of the balloon (giving it the really high drag/momentum that brought it down quickly), however, is that it is utterly and completely dwarfed by the hangar that it's in. Those old blimp hangars were huge. The photographer who took this...

Welcome to the site Coolbear. I agree, it's a fantastic way to learn about astronomy in bite-size chunks. The normal way crater chains form is for an object to break up into several large pieces that then separate into a train of objects due to tidal forces. The comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which hit Jup...

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap081014.html Yep, it's a shadow. I don't think I see any significant digital noise, but it looks like the APOD was stretched from a slightly smaller image (try viewing the "full size" version). This creates some artifacts. It's interesting how the highligh...

Ron, I was just wondering what you see in the image that implies the "enormously destructive effect" by North Korea. Is it the total lack of an electric infrastructure??? Precisely. I've read commentary on this exact subject before. Look how distinctly the DMZ is drawn by the lights. You ...

Thanks for the detailed post Mr. Pacholka! It looks like the kind of place that's worth going back to those 4 times, despite the long drive. I hope the skepticism of those less personally familiar with night sky photography doesn't deter you from continuing to share your excellent images. Keep up th...