Starship Asterisk*

brian, Perhaps you would like to consider the thesis in the post immediately before yours? John Yes, that's one possibility: a bit like when the first snows of winter fall overnight onto a previously warm landscape and, as the morning sun rises, it warms the snow just sufficiently so that that heat...

I guess perspective has much to say about interpretation. Indeed. To get round this illusion, it's often advantageous to rotate the image by 180 deg and see what that looks like. Let's have a look... Okay, to me, that still looks like a dark moon which has an overlay of white material. Look at the ...

So I'm looking at today's APOD and I'm remembering how they can't quite work out how/why Iapetus got it's dark blanket (because it's not quite in the same plane as the (past or present) orbit etc) and I'm thinking to myself... "Doesn't that look as though Iapetus was a dark moon which has been ...