Starship Asterisk*

Turned upside down, the smiley mouth could be the Milky Way.

Nice references. Let me add "Shine on you crazy diamond" and "See Emily play".

On the subject of Orion's arm in our galaxy, some of you might like this site:http://www.orionsarm.com/

Thanks everybody for the distance discussion. One thought I had when I originally asked my question was to ask M101 to please don't move while we took its picture

That's funny, NASA and Wikipedia say 21 million, the Messier catalog says 27 and many others say in between. So who's right?

Shouldn't that have been 210 thousand light-centuries?

Someone has been messing with the background stars. In the second and last picture, the background star field at the bottom are copies. But not in the center around the comet, so it can't be the same region of space. I think I see more parts that are copies of each other.

Can someone explain where the pink halo around the head comes from? Is that an image enhancement artifact? It doesn't seem to belong to the head, is it something in the line of sight behind the head? It doesn't seem 'natural' to me because the head has dark edges.

The word "voorwerpjes" means "little objects", which is a little odd for such large objects. The proper plural of "voorwerp" is "voorwerpen".

How is this possible? Our moon is a lot smaller than both Saturn and the sun, so it shouldn't be able to cast such a giant shadow on Saturn. EDIT: Aha, I see, the moon blocks part of Saturn. The title "The Moon Eclipses Saturn" made me assume a shadow was cast. Next time I'll put on my rea...

I would have added this question somewhere in there: "Did the railroad crossing lights go berserk?"

Also, it is said that some galaxies are visible to the unaided eye from the southern hemisphere. I never had the opportunity to see for myself yet.

Hi,

There's a typo in the title: eclispe.

Does anyone have an explanation for the two dark patches on the left and right 'inside' earth? Are these the earth poles or the equator?

Is it possible that the void behind our sun, was created by its motion through the cloud?

Maybe the anomalies indicate that there is, or at least was, something outside our universe.

It would be nice if this map could be mapped onto Google Earth.

The nebula's actual diameter is approximately 0.8 light-years or about 600 times the size of our Solar System

I think that depends on what you consider being part of our Solar System. That statement goes nowhere if you include the Oort cloud.

What orbits at 0.00066667 light-years of our Sun?

Earth is a "Goldilocks" planet. Everything is just right. Just right air. Just right sun. Just right gas giant neighbors. Just right size moon. Just right rotation rate, axial tilt, composition, weather patterns. Just right, well, everything needed to support advanced life. There are near...

I'm wondering how life would have developed if the Earth had more mass. I guess that fish as we know them would all sink to the bottom. Would plants grow as high as ours? Would land creatures be built more massively, or lighter than we are? I guess swimming would be out of the question for us. Would...

This might help in translating UTC into your local time:

http://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/universal-time

The explanation is very interesting, but very hard to follow because of the background noise. In fact after the first couple of seconds I really wanted to stop watching because it was impossible to understand what this person was saying.

Re Blue Streak: Would you please post the coordinates? I can't quite make them out in the image. Perhaps the URI to the original images? Which wavelengths, optical? False-color infra-red, x-ray? Doesn't look like a galactic collision remnant. I don't know any details, the coordinates are at the bot...

Hi all, while looking at the neighborhood of this galaxy in Google Earth, I came across a strange blue streak. Does anybody have any idea what this might be? My guess it's just an image processing artifact: http://img402.imageshack.us/img402/3241/bluestreak2.th.jpg http://img805.imageshack.us/img805...

Great photo, those outerworldly shadows inside the dome are fantastic.

Minor detail: there's an 's' missing from the title "MACS 1206: A Galaxy Cluster Gravitational Len" on the APOD page.

To each his own, but I don't think this qualifies as APOD material.