Starship Asterisk*

Something stirred up the Oort cloud. Three comets in one year and presumably all three are " comet of the year " billing ? Not really. C/2012 S1 (discovered at the ISON observatory) is on a very different orbit than C/2011 L4 (discovered by the PanSTARRS project). I'm not sure what third ...

someone at apod needs to explain the circular appendage by the mouth? wikipedia does not show anything like that in the buccal tube area. it looks like a computer generated image that has been photoshopped. It is a scanning electron microscope image that has had color photoshopped in to replicate t...

Amazing creatures. I recently did a timelapse video of waterbears emerging from their dormant state "tuns". I was amazed how fast they became active. I set the time lapse camera to go for 3 hours but they were already very active at less than 20 minutes ! http://youtu.be/rE-6c45DaiI Reall...

In NASA News release 2012-260 dated August 27 2012 it states "Curiosity already is returning more data from the Martian surface than have all of NASA's earlier rovers combined". That surprised me greatly! This statement was widely misinterpreted. What they really meant, is that in the fir...

I'm sure NuSTAR will allow people to do some marvelous science but we need to look beyond all that. The satellite has a projected two-year operational lifetime but what about after that? Will NuSTAR simply become another piece of stuff in the great junkyard in the sky or does it have the means for ...

It's reassuring to know that so much more gets spent on spying on private people than on the pursuit of human understanding... It's not spent on spying on private people. It's spent on spying on people with the ability to kill millions of private people with the flick of a couple switches. It's ver...

There's nothing that causes local contrast halos but the clarity slider, which may have another name in any other editing programs. I'm only aware of Adobe's Camera Raw. Most sharpening algorithms produce contrast halos. Also, in an image like this that is likely to need its dynamic range adjusted,...

is anyone else saving all the images to make a gif? I believe you will be able get all the images after the transit is over from the SDO mission website, and I expect the project team will release their own movie of the transit. In fact, I just looked, and they have a live updating replay of the tr...

It's raining in the Pacific NW, just like during the solar eclipse last month.

So the semi-live feed from SDO makes a great APOD for my area.

However, did anyone notice the apparent corporate sabotage of Venus?

Why are there seemingly so many “pairs” of stars in this photo? Is that just coincidence? Interesting observation. I see it too. The most immediate possible explanations that come to mind are: 1.) There's not. It's just an approximately random distribution of stars, and the proximity of star pairs ...

Has the vertical scale been exaggerated? This can happen with NASA images. Usually when NASA exaggerates vertical scale, it's to emphasize particular features for a legitimate reason, and they mention the enlarged scale in the caption. The LRO team press release doesn't mention any stretching in th...

This guy had it right 1800 years before Copernicus. If people had believed him, we would have been ahead of the game...If the Church had listened to Galileo, we would have been ahead of the game there too....it is too bad... This guy deserves more than just a crater named after him....maybe A MOON....

Any photo/telescope/other field of view covers an angle, not inherently a specific width. For a given field of view, the width increases with distance. The reason it's worded that way is because Dr. Nemiroff or Dr. Bonnell (whoever wrote today's caption) is speaking as an astronomer who thinks in te...

I think this image is stupid. All the technology we have... beautiful pictures of mars and Saturn yet we can't even get a decent photo of the asteroid that's closer to the moon? Come on man how dumb do you think we are? I think some perspective would help. It's 400 meters across. The moon is 8700 t...

A related phenomenon is that often during a thunderstorm, after a nearby lightning stroke, the rainfall suddenly becomes more intense. I figure that's because the raindrops are carrying negative charge down to the ground, building up positive charge in the clouds. The drops fall against that field,...

What I find interesting is his comment just before the drop: "And hopefully, they'll hit the ground at the same time ... How about that!" Hopefully? You mean they hadn't rehearsed this at least 50 times in the giant vacuum chamber back at NASA on earth? Or did he not fully believe the phy...

Supposedly on the Moon , Scott drops the feather and the hammer while Irwin is seen moving around . The question is : who is holding and operating the movie camera ??? There's still debate to this day if it was on a tripod, or if Marvin the Martian happened to be trying to blow up the moon that day...

Surely if this image was created using thermal imaging, the various tones correspond to the temperature of the different materials, and not 'light and dark' in repect to the visible spectrum. Or is the correspondence between tone and temperature always very close with lithic materials? Curious Mich...

Instead of coming up with a new theory of gravity that fits the data, we've continually propped GR up by proposing the existence of forms of matter ('dark matter') and energy ('dark energy') for which there is no theoretical understanding and no observational evidence, despite decades of searching....

The oceans are big. Really big. And really, really deep. I find it hard to believe that all of that water came from comet impacts. And if they did, wouldn't comets of that mass cause planetary deformation sufficient to have reheated its surface to vaporizing temperatures again? The Late Heavy Bomba...

Anybody who wants to offer an opinion on whether CME's can be caused by the sungrazer comets would be strongly advised to read this article first, by an astronomer who actually studies these comets: http://sungrazer.nrl.navy.mil/index.php?p=news/comets_cmes His opinion (based on actually crunching s...

As for the guy who claims we should be happy because this is free, you are a moron. Indeed! This site, as are all government sites, is wholly funded by TAX revenue. It is supposed to deliver information related to astronomy, not pseudo-barcode technology. And for the suggestion it's meant for all t...

This is the worst image in a long line of bad images posted over this past year. Just about every day's picture has been a disappointment. That seems like pretty severe hyperbole to me. Just yesterday we had a really amazing simulation of how dark matter may have shaped the evolution of the univers...

This strikes me as the kind of thing that would be better expressed as a video, with a 3D "flyover" showing where all these asteroids are, and maybe even animated to show their motion. 'Course that might scare the hell out of folks (me included). -Noel It absolutely would! Here's an old v...

(Note that we, ourselves, no longer possess the capability to play the phonographs on board Voyager.) We chose a deliberately primitive recording technique in order to suggest a (hopefully) obvious means of recovering the data. It's highly doubtful that any civilization intercepting the recording w...