Starship Asterisk*

If anyone wonders if folks at NASA have a sense of humor, or if you just need a smile to start your day, be sure to click on the "no one knows" link.

Absolutely brilliant animation -- so much information packed into such an elegant presentation. Not really "N-hemi-centric", beyond the universal convention that N is "up", but a version without the (distracting, barely legible) labels would be nice. Absolutely agree that it's b...

13.1 Billion on the far right, a red dot under a blue spiral. I hadn't spotted that one! There's another 13.1 just under the large galaxy in the center of the picture. Straight down from that there's another good sized galaxy with a smaller one to its right which sorta seems to point to the right. ...

Hmm. As YUGE a fan of APOD as I am, I see now that my life revolves around it far less than it does for some!

Is that anywhere close to current thinking or am I way off base? All dark matter has mass as well as gravity and must consist in some small part of known matter such as neutrinos and 'free range' planets which are certainly not "all gravity and nothing else." I think that means my second ...

Dark matter is certainly mysterious, because it is apparently "all gravity" and nothing else. Ann Science disclaimer: I read a fair amount about it but I understand fairly little. General Relativity says that gravity is the curvature of space-time due to the presence of matter. As I under...

I did not see anything that looked like a cat's paw to me There are a couple of reasons for that- the very high resolution of the image, and the extreme processing to bring out faint structure. Both are common these days, and explain why the images of so many famous objects look little or nothing l...

Wow. This one blows me away. Great picture.

I'd have thought that since we're dealing with light, that distance and time are pretty much the same thing. We're seeing the object as it looked 15 million years ago. What am I missing? It's a question of semantics. "Now" has formal meanings in physics, and can be used different ways. It...

The immensity of space is at once staggering and yet marvellous. And to assist us, the "light-year" is a very easily understandable term although not fully apprehendable due to our natural limitations. So I marvel at the immensity keeping in my mind that it is a measure of distance only ,...

What does "recent" collision mean in this context?

All well & good, I suppose....but somebody help me out here. What does the 'A' in 'APOD' stand for, again? ~* "It can arise from generalizations from seemingly distant speculation that the information held by a black hole is determined not by its enclosed volume but by the surface area of ...

The heck with the physics. Just once in my life ... someday ... I'd like to see the image in one of these pictures. Never ever have I been able to see them.

What's wrong with me?

What's the little shadow running horizontally on the far right about half way between Saturn's shadow and the top of the picture? -------------------------------------------------------------- Saturn's moon Tethys casts a shadow visible only on the far right. If only I could read! Thank you, neufer.

What's the little shadow running horizontally on the far right about half way between Saturn's shadow and the top of the picture?

Hello Mr. Duggan, Hi Mr. Tucker, Thank you for your interest, Mr. Duggan. I hope my response was substantive and helpful. Absolutely. My interest in this has been to learn a little more about the subject. Mr. Peterson also has a nasty habit of resorting to ad hominem attacks when pressed on a point...

Mr. Peterson, That's just hand-waving. You're not making any serious attempts to substantiate any of your grand pronouncements with references. "Because I say so" doesn't lend your arguments much weight. Best regards, - Roy Tucker I'm not a scientist, but what sort of citations would you ...

You're right, the smart money would be on a continuing trend, but I wouldn't bet the farm on it. But that's what the politicians who are in charge seem to want to do. Doing nothing is betting the farm. Taking preventative action (as "the politicians who are in charge seem to want to do") ...

what is the round shadow to the right?

That's my question as well. It's the little circle near the right edge near the top of the Mimas shadow.

Hi All from a newbie but long-time lurker, amateur astronomer, and armchair cosmologist. While perusing the archives I came across an APOD from 10/29/01 ( http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap011029.html ) proposing that a spinning black hole could be causing surrounding gas to shine brightly by tran...

Here's what strikes me about this picture. Consider a sun like star out in that "stream" which has an earth-like planet in orbit. One of us, having evolved there, would look into the night sky and see ... the Milky Way on steroids???

I want to go there and see.

Sputnick wrote:
Orin - I think the counter-revolving galaxies will slow each others' rotation and their merge will create a globular galaxy.

That's interesting. As the rotation decreased would the galaxy become increasingly compact?

s_h_r_a wrote:Can anyone see the third galaxy in this image?
About 12 o'clock, another galaxy core can be seen ! Am I correct ?

I had the same question. That's what it looks like to me. If so, it's odd that it isn't mentioned in the description. Is it really just a smaller foreground galaxy?

What puzzles my little non-scientific mind is that the "lines" don't emanate from the center of the crater. In some cases they don't seem to come from the crater at all. One or two appear to run right by the crater. Also, many are not straight. Edit: One more thing, there seems to be a fai...

I agree with g-banjo. I wondered why they were calling them troughs until I inverted it. If the troughs look like ridges ... keep looking. It's an optical illusion. When I first saw it I thought it looked like a big rock in the middle with the sun coming from the upper left. It took a while to get ...