Starship Asterisk*

It says in the text accompanying the first APOD of 2009 that "Galileo discovered that [...] Saturn has rings." But wasn't it rather Christian Huygens who first correctly interpreted what to Galileo had remained a mystery? I quote from the ESA website: "Although he saw the rings first,...

yes, now i have a clear picture. when they are called "night shining clouds", that is a bit of a misnomer, because they are just as "night-shining" as for instance the moon - they receive their light from the sun, but because they are so very high up in the atmosphere, they can b...

i don't want to put too fine a point on it, and i take it that the guys and ladies at nasa know what they are doing, but the whole area north of 70° (which includes the larger part of greenland and the whole island of nova zembla, directly under the clouds) was bathed in continuous sunshine during t...

can anybody tell me how they can take a picture of a night sky over the north pole on june 11 when the sun does not set over the north pole until 25 september?