Starship Asterisk*

It looks like the moon is not covering enough of the sun for even an annular eclipse. It certainly does, and I noticed that too. I think it is a photographic effect, where the sharp sun light spreads over, or overflows, the nearest surrounding area, thus making the dark moon smaller than it actuall...

Two different hits in approximately the same place?

What would have happened if such a meteor as in the photo had hit the ISS?

There is some confusing terminology here. The colors we see are called "iridescence" but these are not "iridescent clouds". They are "nacreous clouds" or "polar stratospheric clouds". Iridescent clouds are seen near the Sun (or the Moon) and are common. PSCs ...

I am not doubting anything. Nor am I talking about mechanisms, orientation, or anything like that.

I am just pointing out that two different hotos of the same nebula have been presented as APOD 2014 and 2024, but with different colours then and now. Why green then, if the correct colour is blue?

The same mysterious nebula was depicted ten years ago (https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap140718.html).

But then, the "telltale blue emission from doubly ionized oxygen" was not blue but very clearly green!

So, which is the correct colour aand why?

Bluemold wrote: ↑Fri May 03, 2024 11:48 am Some day these aliens may pop up and say ”You named our planets what?!”

Or, maybe, they may be amused, or even honoured that we are so interested in their planets!

I appreciate NASA is an American agency which is beholden to increasing interest in space for Americans but I would appreciate having the courtesy of having conversions to metric units in brackets after the imperial ones, for the benefit of us international readers. I agree, especially since the di...

What you write ("bleeding into...") is exactly what I meant. The dark spot in the center (the Moon) looks smaller in the picture than it is in real life.

The dark spot is too small. At the time of the eclipse, the angular distance between Venus and Jupiter was about 45 degrees. I enlarged the photo on my screen until the distance was 45 centimeters. At that scale the sun/moon disk should be half a centimeter in diameter (5 millimeters), but the dark ...

Yes, that is a possible explanation, but I wonder if there could be something else at play here, namely the camera itself. If I enlarge your second photo (by Thanakrit), the dark lunar disk is significally smaller than the sun disk, as displayed before or after the eclipse.

Why is there a small dark spot in the middle of the sun (that isn't there to see)? I have seen this curious phenomenon in some of my own amateur photos (taken during other eclipses).

Has the Webb telescope ever taken a picture like this one, from its position in Lagrange point far outside the moon's orbit?
Or is it not possible because of its construction, or even forbidden because of the Sun sitting in that direction?

I think the ripples are shock waves, and are not caused by "pockets of relatively hot or rarefied air deflecting moonlight less strongly than pockets of relatively cool or compressed air.." I agree. The given explanation sounds too fancifully conceived. What pockets? Where did they come f...

Sorry but they don't look the same color to me, with or without the bridge. Not even close, one is definitely lighter, one darker. But that's the whole point of an optic illusion ! - In this case: that they "don't look the same color", but yet they are. If you measure the color in the two...

Thank you, Steve and Christian! I think I would appreciate this "hidden galaxy" a lot more, and also appreciate the efforts behind revealing its appearance, if I could also be shown what it looks like when it is hidden --that is what it looks like before filtering and manipulating noise an...

Similar photos of this galaxy have been published eight times (see Archive!); always with the title "IC 342: Hidden Galaxy". I have nothing against this galaxy, but I would like to see just how it is "hidden". Each time the caption claims it is only glimpsed through the veil of s...

The idea this time was, I guess, to show the difference in size by giving us the chance to compare it to the older photo.

Certainly a very nice asteroid! Something struck me about the legend to the photo – it's an unsystematic mixture of metric and Imperial units: ... a distance of just over 400 kilometers ... at 4.5 kilometer per second or around 10,000 miles per hour ... less than 800 meters (about 0.5 miles) ... onl...

I reacted when I read about the "atmospheric methane that absorbs infrared light". But, in order to be seen by Webb, it is not enough that it absorbs infrared light. It also has to emit infrared light. Right?

Phobos doesn't look so dark to me. Maybe a darker shade of gray should have been used to color the moon.

The star in the upper left hand corner has a double star effect from the JW camera. Is this an anomaly or is it bc there are actually 2 stars really close to each other? I just noticed that, too. It must be a double star, either an optical double or a visual binary. They seem to have about the same...

"On Jupiter, light-colored clouds are usually higher up than dark clouds."

The same goes for earth, I think. Isn't just because clouds higher up get more light than the ones deeper down?
- Which are in more shadow than the ones on top, of course.
As simple as that?

Couldn't one reason for the flat rocks be that they are flat because they are sedimentary rocks?

As someone has already pointed out, the backward link in the APOD of March 1, is in error. It points to a date that has not yet occurred!