Starship Asterisk*

Like most of us, I was perplexed by the blue wings of the star halfway up the picture, to the right of the Milky Way. After some deliberation, my theory is that this photo was taken with a very wide angle lens. Such lenses tend to have quite a large lens at the front. Their absolute aperture is very...

Congratulations, APOD!

This is one of the most educating APOD pictures of the last couple of years!

Kudos also to the photographer, who so brilliantly and painstakingly showcased us subtleties about solstices most of us have never realized!

Excellent work, all!

Strange ring on Venus?
Venus seems to have a large ring whose center is towards Earth. My first thought was that it is an artifact of image processing, but then it should be affected by the dark part of Venus, and be half-moon like. But now it is undisturbed by Venus' terminator.

This is Venus in the picture. What explains the peculiar form? https://science.nasa.gov/files/science-red/s3fs-public/styles/image_gallery_scale_960w/public/atoms/VenusDec2016March2017smallC.jpg?itok=7249kzB7 I'm sure you're not asking about the phases of Venus, but in any case, I thought we might ...

A question: The background stars seem "out of focus". But since depth-of-field really isn't an issue in astrophotographs, that must be an indication of the general sharpness of the image. -- In spite of that, some parts of the trunk really seem much sharper, even if you magnify the picture...

This is Venus in the picture. What explains the peculiar form?

Sirs! While the explanation to this Apod picture is technically right, I take serious exception to publishing a picture of the analemma that shows the Winter Solstice when the actual date is the Autumn Equinox. This will cause every off-guard uneducated reader to leave with the impression that the p...

What is the light area on the right side of Mars? Is it snow, heavy overcast, or what?

The light area by the horizon is said to be the terminator. But the picture shows the center of Milky Way and it is said to be taken in mid-year. Then the Sun would have been behind the photographer.

This exact picture and text were APOD on March 14 2010.

Have you joined the recycling crowd, or do you think people have a short memory?

Or are you saving on editorial costs?

The annotation says "Earth and Moon" and points to a white dot. To me, that says that they both are where pointed, but I can't seem to find the Moon near the Earth. Maybe it's behind the Earth? But that is unlikely. Therefore, I'd prefer the annotation to only mention the Earth. If somebod...

This was an interesting APOD. What first caught my eye was the peculiar distribution of stars in the picture. I decided to write here about it, but then of course I read the text.

Being from the North, I think this simply is aurora borealis. Nothing fancier nor more complicated. As I see it, the first clouds come at 33 sec, and before that, there's no occultation or dimming of stars that would coincide with the patchiness in the green area. That is one of the hallmarks of aur...

IleneK wrote:is it not "galaxies" instead of "galaxy's"? and does not a sentence near the end really need editing?

I find this an alarming trend. These articles used to be so well written.

the most information you can get from this image is about 3 x 10^65 bits for a normal sized computer monitor. An upper limit for the data you can get from that image is 273886 * 8 = 2191088 bits. That is the size of the file. In reality the information content is even less because some bits are los...

If we are moving so fast, which I don't doubt by the way, why do other changes 'out there' take so long to reach us? I'm assuming it is because of the massive light distances between objects. But still, 600 km per second. 1,8921,600,000km per year. That must be pretty close to the speed of light? A...

The picture shows some "dots" along the middle. I'm sure they don't come from the CMBR, but are artifacts of some kind.

I'd love to see a proper explanation for them.

If you look really carefully, you can find up to eight such dots, horizontally aligned halfway up the picture.

I have a hard time understanding why this is even discussed here. Do people really walk through their lives with eyes shut?? This "triple sunrise" is taken through a double glazed window. All that is needed is that the window panes are not exactly parallel. This is actually the norm when t...

The article says "The distorted shape and faint tidal tail suggest that NGC 3628 is interacting gravitationally with the other spiral galaxies in the Leo triplet". I'd say both the distortion and the tidal tail remnant are /not/ from interaction with the other Leo triplet galaxies. To me t...