Starship Asterisk*

The sperm swimming towards the egg.
Are we fertilizing space?

Well, that's not terribly useful information except in the context of humans in space. In any case, it's not that we haven't learned anything. It's about costs and benefits. And IMO the costs of the ISS and other man-in-space efforts have vastly outweighed the benefits. Of course, many would say th...

It's incredible that we went from the first man in space to boots on the moon in only eight years.

I have a feeling of satisfaction that images like this from the surface of Mars have become 'common place' in my day-to-day viewing pleasure.

When I zoom in on the Galaxy in this image my mind sets it to motion and It starts to spin slowly.
I guess our mind knows how things are supposed to spin..

It's a little confusing for me to understand how Hubble caught a picture of an asteroid burning up in our atmosphere. Is there still enough atmosphere where Hubble is in orbit that it can catch an asteroid burning up while pointed away from the Earth? Or was this image captured when Hubble was point...

Who else played 'Southern Cross' by Crosby, Stills, & Nash after seeing today's APOD? -- When you see the Southern Cross for the first time, You understand now why you came this way. 'Cause the truth you might be running from is so small, But it's as big as the promise, the promise of a coming d...

Does anyone know of a version of this flyby video that hasn't been enhanced?

Exciting!

The video link at the end of today's explanation under 'be visible' shows the peak of the shower to be between the 14th and the 15th, contradicting today's APOD verbiage and a quick google search.

My 8th science class would to know...what phase of the moon would you say is visible at about 5 seconds of the clip. We are having a tough time with the hole rotation of Earth vs. revolution of the moon. Thanks! It is a bit difficult to be certain, but the photos appear to have been taken when the ...

The Galactic Home of a Historic Explosion. NOT AN HISTORIC! An is only used when preceding a word that begins with a vowel sound. For example: An abuse of the English language. Funny, I read it as 'a' when I read the title, but noticed the author used 'an' shortly thereafter. 'A' is probably best, ...

I recently had a retinal issue in my right eye, and this morning while looking at APOD I found myself thinking of how I would miss things like this if I lost my sight. I tried to describe the photo to myself to see if it would do it any justice. Hardly. I found myself zooming in and staring at the i...

What reasons do we have to even consider that its origins may be extraterrestrial, in contrast to all other animals on the Earth? Ann To me, because tardigrades are such extremophiles, the possibility of them surviving an accidental trip to earth becomes more of a possibility than say, an earthworm...

When I saw this, I wondered how the background stars were visible and not saturated out by the light of our sun. I figured it must be a composite image. It seems that is the case.
Does the starfield in the image carry any accuracy in our stars superimposed position?

+2 Awesome!

Why such poor resolution?

It resonates differently in my mind when thinking about it as a 'volcano' instead of pressure being released from a sub-surface ocean. I'll have to ponder on this a bit more. The images/gif of Io's volcano are much more impressive than the recent -possible- plumes of Europa caught by Hubble. I wonde...

The Hubble site says they estimate the plumes to travel to 125 miles up before then falling back to the surface. Using 1.315 m/s2 as Europas gravity, that would require a minimum of about 40,000 PSI pressure under the surface to force water to that height. And it would be leaving the surface at abou...

Pretty cool.

I didn't like the radiation comparison. .39 Rad exposure at earth is a transient measurement compared to the 20 million Rad exposure they stated for the entire mission. It would be a much better comparison stating the expected average transient Rad measurement at the distance this craft will be orbi...

Does anyone else naturally see this picture to be on its side? My mind wants to rotate it 90 degrees.

Mars, I love it!

Hypnotic indeed.
I like Jyrki's thought experiment. If it requires three (complete) periods, Jupiter verification would have had to start when I was born in 79..

I'm blown away by the statement that all of the outer blue stars are under 10 million years old. It's like saying each of these stars is a one year old in human terms..