Starship Asterisk*

I think a better analogy would be. When you shake a sealed box and it rattles, and someone tells you the rattle is a "Genie in a lamp", you are skeptical as to their explanation as to why the box rattles and not the fact that the box itself rattles. No, I don't think so. Nobody is saying ...

I'm no astrophysicist, but I am skeptical of something we can't see but which is required to make the math work out. Seems more likely to me the math could be wrong. When you shake a sealed box and hear something rattle, are you skeptical that there is something inside because you can't see it? Mos...

Can anyone explain to me what dark matter is? It is matter that we can't see, probably because it doesn't interact (or interacts only very weakly) with electromagnetic radiation. But it has mass, and therefore interacts gravitationally with normal matter, which is the primary reason for inferring i...

Could this be yet another Einstein Cross? http://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php?t=10380 This object has nothing to do with gravitational lensing. Keep in mind that it's very close- just 5000 ly. We see gravitational lensing when massive distant galaxies bend the light of even more distant quasars....

I don't doubt the validity of the conclusion. It is very interesting. I just feel that if the image is going to be "processed to enhance details", it would be even more compelling if it could have also been "processed to remove artifacts". I would have even rotated this image to...

I would conclude that the details of the image which we are looking for are as subtle as the optical artifacts which result from their measurement. The evidence of these artifacts unfortunately casts some doubt upon the intended interpretation. Perhaps you are not accustomed to looking at images wh...

This image has a lot of distortion (stars near the edges are elongated), and five of the bright stars show hexagonal spike pattern, possibly artifact of the optics. Can anybody comment on these artifacts? I think it's likely that the coma-like distortion of stars away from the nebula results becaus...

I have no doubt that a photograph could be taken by exposing the plate continuously for the length of time it took for the asteroid to travel that far. Yes, such an image can be taken very easily. See http://www.cloudbait.com/gallery/comet/asteroids.html for some examples. But scientifically, such ...

Nonsense! Or more politely, that may not be the explanation. A continuous exposure that showed such discontinuity could have that explanation, but this is not a continuous exposure. It is described as a 'composite', many individual exposures, each elongated into a dash by the duration of that expos...

Why does the apparent brightness of the asteroid 2006 VV2 change so dramatically along its tragectory? You are seeing variation caused by changes in the surface brightness over 77 minutes of the object's 146 minute rotation rate. It is primarily through photometry on asteroids that we learn their r...

I checked the spec sheet for the StellaCam III with the cooler as posted at http://www.optcorp.com/product.aspx?pid=319-325-9051. These cameras look great for looking at deep sky objects, but I wonder how well they do for meteors. The reasons are a. the small array (811x508 pixels), the small pixel...

Nice image, but it seems to me to be quite inaccurate. Scaling the image, the refracted and scattered sunlight is extending to a whopping 280 km altitude. I'd expect the majority of the scatter to be below 50 km or so; in this image that would be a ~2-3 pixel band of red around the edge rather than ...

The Czech people, who do quite a lot of meteor imaging, use choppers on their large-frame photographic cameras quite successfully and have not reported problems with those. Well, with film there is little other choice. An interesting possibility with CCDs is electronic chopping, something I've not ...

My main concern is not hardware cost. It is the ability to get two types of images from the same wide angle device. The first is an image or series of images that is maximally useful for meteor science. That would mean time-resolving the meteor. The second is an image or a series of images that are...

I originally sent this to Bob Nemiroff and a few others as a private communication, but Bob thought it would be of general interest and asked me to repost it here. I'm discussing allsky cameras that are specifically intended for recording meteors. As you may know, I operate a network of allsky came...