Starship Asterisk*

bystander wrote:Widens???

Narrows?

Given the way that the shadow widens, I assume that the source of light is not the sun, but Saturn. Is this correct?

It's impressive that they were able to take a picture of the equinox in June.

I went 1 light year beyond Betelgeuse and looked back at Betelgeuse (blocking an invisible earth but in earth's location). Betelgeuse is so far away that most of the stars that we are familiar with are too faint to see from Betelgeuse. Three bright Gemini stars are visible however. That is way cool...

If such a photo were taken at a location where the sun was visible as a complete ring around the moon, then would the reflections on the t-shirt also be complete rings? The star on the upper right is Betelgeuse in the constellation Orion. Next to it is not a star at all, but the image of a DC-9 cons...

From today's APOD:

Not intended to indicate substandard mental prowess, their popular names refer to their similar, dumbbell or hourglass shapes.

I don't know, next to an Einstein ring, they look to me like nincompoops.

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap080728.html

Why is the dust "indirect evidence of a destructive planetary collision" and not direct evidence that dust can't form planets around close binary stars?

I think Clinton was hounded by the meteor too. But why don't the star trails have gaps in them? And why did the meteor take 4 (or is it 6) seconds to streak across?

Thanks Professor Nemiroff. Now that I understand why you post APODs that have nothing to do with A, I recommend porn next time for increased effectiveness.

I thought the video was a thoroughly entertaining, but shallow image of our fascinating universe. Apod's statement "Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured". should be made more specific, or anything goes.

Thanks for your input iamlucky13. My nephew is an astrophysicist, so I called him and asked him what's up with the brown color. He said he'd get back to me. Then, his wife came to visit us. I asked her why her husband didn't come and she said that as long as he didn't have an answer for me, he wasn'...

Oops, that's me. Sorry guys. I try to make these photos look like they're taken on the moon, or on mars, but it's no easy job believe me. Nice catch.

Jimmy Snyder
Assistant to the Properties Manager,
Department of Public Relations,
Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The "DUST" has a naturally brown appearance due to the material that it is comprised of. The blue light from the star in the reflection nebula is reflected off the brown dust. When you energize the Hydrogen Gas in the area, the gas glows red. Thanks again BMAONE23. I finally get it on the...

Thanks BMAONE23. The "Brown" material is interstellar gas and dust (which shines blue in reflection nebula) Why does it shine brown in this image? The "White" material is light from hundreds of thousands of stars behind the dust Why does it appear only in a relatively small porti...

The image is roughly towards the galactic center, so you're seeing a big portion of the Milky Way and its "fade out" away from that point. Thanks, Case, for taking a look at this. I wouldn't call it 'fade out". There are relatively sharp demarcations between the white nebular materia...

In today's APOD, I see stars against a black background on the right, stars against a white background to the left of center, and stars against a brownish cloudy background on the far left. Can someone explain these different areas for me?

I must conclude that the photo of Jan 29 2008 was taken in the Southwest. How do you explain the foreground paved with tiles or bricks and a man made object resembling a fire hydrant in the right bottom corner of the picture? Peace. arnom Ooops, how careless of us. I told Nick to crop that photo, b...

Thanks all for these excellent posts. The images in the site mentioned by JohnD provide most of what I wanted to know. The site said the minimum solar energy days (sols?) come in June 2008. It looks like Spirit has a 35 meter sprint ahead of it. Go Spirit go! I assume it needs to get to where it's g...

The image is really nice and I'm glad they showed it. However, it has little to do with the explanation. I would like to see where the winter outpost is and the sol when Spirit needs to get there. The projected path would be nice too.

So clouds are needed to see sun dogs, but the clouds have to be of the high altitude, thin, wisplike strands/white veil -kind. Thanks Case. I realize now that I had been making an unjustified assumption. Namely, because of the symmetric placement of the sun dogs, I thought the ice crystals were pla...

Today on the way home from work, I saw a pair of sun dogs. At first I could only see the left one which was in a location where there were some wispy clouds. On the right, I could not see anything except a brightness that was more wishful thinking than sun dog. However, there were no clouds where th...

geckzilla wrote:I just realized that jimmy said what I wanted to say much earlier in this thread but in about 3 sentences.

Don't kick yourself around too much:

I am sorry for the length of my letter, but I had not the time to write a short one. - Blaise Pascal

Thanks for the history lesson azutjw. But you left out my favorite part. The first answer was supplied by BMAONE23. It was thoughful, respectful and probably, but not certainly correct. Most likely just a chance alignment of stars that are 10's of lightyears apart Did you catch that 'most likely' pa...

Electrons have mass weight, though the entire mass might become unstable if too many were ripped free from theit host atoms, but could those few ambient cosmic rays that manage to reach the earths surface cause a gradual stripping of electrons from the mass? The lack of 50 micrograms worth of elect...

While it appears to us as a circle, it is still just a simple, random dispersal of stars (as random as the gas cloud from which they were born would allow). It is by no means clear from the photo that the stars in the circle were born from a coherent gas cloud. There is no reason to believe that th...