Starship Asterisk*

I think the lack of star trails is primarily due to the scale. They simply aren't visible in the relatively small image, and overflow of light onto adjacent pixels may also help hide them. Also, the image looks fairly noisy, so I'm guessing it was taken at around ISO 1600, or perhaps even 3200 if he...

Whoa...hold-up there...Scratch the image I linked above. NASA just gave the media a viewing with both rotating service structures opened up, and both crawlers parked at the bases of the pads...and mother nature joined in the show. Larger size here: http://mediaarchive.ksc.nasa.gov/detail.cfm?mediaid...

What would you do with a million dollars? :shock: The first time since 2001 that there's been two shuttles on the pad at the same time. STS-125 Atlantis will be going up to service the Hubble. STS-400 Endeavor is standing by in the background as a rescue shuttle in case Atlantis suffers damage that ...

The detail is awesome. 120 format film is great.

There are definitions of stars that say they are objects with reactions in the core that radiate light. Jupiter, Neptune, Saturn, and even Earth meet that definition. It is just as likely to end up that the object is a double star. There are cool stars. That near infrared spectra is probably also s...

The energy in the fuel would not increase, so neither would the thrust.

Sorry about the misquote EMC. Interestingly, the IEDAB didn't actually say we're all dead. It just said the earth had been destroyed. Draw you own conclusions. :lol: The God Particle (higgs boson) http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/03/god-particle/particle-interactive How can you create a partic...

neufer wrote:http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap080907.html

Capturing meteorites in Antarctic:

http://geology.cwru.edu/~ansmet/meteorites/index.html

Wow. Posing for gag pictures in Antarctica...nerds.

"The world breathed a sigh of relief as our predicted demise - at 5pm - came and went with not even a whimper, let alone a bang." Geeze...for something as important as this you can't trust the media. Go to an authoratative source: http://qntm.org/?board Or better yet, recognize it with yo...

Great point about the cosmic rays Chris. I was starting to get genuinely mind-boggled by what they might be. I would suggest that some of the "point sources" might also be cosmic rays coming nearly straight in rather than hot pixels.

Excellent! It gets my vote.

Thanx to all for the info. Does anyone know of a source that lists temperatures over time for any of the other planets? Not the sorted data, but at least the conclusions are fairly easy to find. The main problems are there's no long term records of the temperatures of the planets, and it's hard to ...

I'm not arguing one way or the other, but BMAONE23, I have to point out a slight error in your reasoning. You're looking at localized warming over urban areas on the assumption that this is where the "pollution" is highest. I've quoted pollution because that has often been defined in diffe...

It's almost amusing they worked hard to design a lightweight arm that could dig half a meter through packed clay to find ice...they found it after only 5 cm. They hardly dug at all. Two comments: 1. Overkill is a good thing. I went to the ballgame the other night, and my team won 9-1. I didn't say ...

Maybe it's an illusion but on the panorama it kind of looks like the Phoenix is sitting in a hole or depression. Do you supose they're working the backhoe overtime? :twisted: Orin It's an illusion, based partially on the need to project the panorama into a flat plane, just like the trouble with map...

Arramon wrote:Now is that corona being shaped by the magnetic field lines of the Sun? Looks like it from the lines they are in. Most excellent composite.

Yep.

Anybody know what this is? Venus? Mercury?

I have to say, the caption is chock-full of interesting information for today's APOD. It explains very well not just what we're seeing, but why it's important.

(BTW, its very quite on the Phoenix front. A lot of scraping, however it never found your pony nor any baleen) On that side note, they're still having trouble with the oven doors on the TEGA instrument. They're acting under the assumption that the next attempt will be the last with it, so they're p...

They do frequent reboosts. The Jules Verne ATV has done at least 2 that I know of, probably more. They will raise the orbit to a higher elevation (I think another 100 km) after the last major component is delivered in 2010. This will actually make it slightly harder to get to, but the payoff in redu...

Yes, infrared would be false color. I couldn't discern from the links or from the Messenger pages which wavelengths were actually used to construct this image and what colors they corresponded to. However, they did say they used a "statistical method" to enhance the colors. I presume they ...

You have an interesting thought train, emc. :wink: I just had to say it's a stunning picture. The ancient Roman architecture is a very fitting complement to a picture featuring Jupiter. I was looking for more pictures of the Temple of Hadrian, and I found this scrolling panorama (requires Java :cry:...

The APOD caption says it is an "enhanced color" image (meaning natural colors have simply been brightened) but it looks to me like it is false color. I'm not sure what minerals we might be seeing, but apparently that is discussed in some of the papers that were written based on data from t...

The polar grid overlayed on the image is confusing because it confounds following the arms and it isn't centered on the galactic center. I was starting to think it was some ridiculous artistic touch to make the image look more technical. However, looking at the big image, I finally realized it was c...

I agree a non-stereo version linked directly to in the caption would be much appreciated, but I'm not sure this is always easy to do if the author only sends the editors finished image. However, the first link is to an Apollo images gallery, with a lot of great pictures, including from Apollo 17. It...

orin stepanek wrote:I do believe those are the rover's thread marks.
Orin

Of course, but the way it's backtracked and turned, and crossed back and forth over it's own tracks the last couple of weeks makes them look pretty convincingly like footprints at a first glance.