Starship Asterisk*

I am unhappy about the sequencing of the overlaps. How come the fourth image from left in in front of all others if this be a time sequence. Or am I just dumb and the whole composite is Photoshopped? Yes John, it is photoshopped. In a real multi exposed image parts of the moon would have been overl...

Yes, and as it recedes its apparent size gets smaller. Conversely, millions of years ago, it must have been immense, maybe even larger than the earth's shadow. I do not think so. When you approach the earth, from the current postion of the moon, the part of the sky blinded by the earth, increases i...

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap080820.html It also shows that even as the shadow cones down the further from the Earth Look at the third moon from the left. The shadow cone does not 'fit' to the generally circular pattern. From Mare Humorum over Fra Mauro towards Sinus Medii the cone pattern seems to ...

But why don't the star trails have gaps in them? And why did the meteor take 4 (or is it 6) seconds to streak across? http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080816.html refering to the gap in the meteor trail and the continuous trails of the stars. This image has been made by some sort of automatic mac...

I was understanding that when a star goes nova or other type of explosion less intense than a supernova, it was because something interrupted the current flowing thru the star, and as a result the bottling magnetic fields collapsed and allowed the explosion. Another way of describing it might be to...

Harry quoted an abstract from http://bourabai.narod.ru/landscheidt/publications.htm ABSTRACT. [snipped] Statistical tests, that confirm these links, additionally point to IOT connection with temperature in Central Europe and the number of icebergs that pass south of latitude 48° N. Statistical tests...

Surface iron is rare, in comparison to the core, which is where nearly all of it ended up. The key point- which you make- is that we find iron ore . We don't find veins of metallic iron (they do exist, but are extremely rare). We find iron bound up with other elements, in complex minerals. The Eart...

Iron is dense, and sinks to the center of large objects while they are still molten. This is certainly true for all of the terrestrial bodies you list above. It is the outer portions of large bodies that is rich in Si, a light element. And in the case of Mars, there is still enough iron oxide on it...

Many people have proposed that stars form layers like onions as opposed to a generalized mixing of gasses. Perhaps the Oxygen might be just that particular layer of the star that was previously shed From the wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_evolution ) http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

Since space would move around the ship, the theory does not violate Einstein's Theory of Relativity, which states that it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate a massive object to the speed of light. Nice. Space is moving and what does happen to all matter inside space? If the matte...

G'day NoelC, I keep hearing that the "big bang" supposedly left us with primarily hydrogen and helium, and that all other heavier elements ("metals" in star-speak) have been made in stars or supernovae... That is the big picture, the main distribution of baryonic matter, the 4% m...

Art Neu endorf fer has showed a jelly fish, named medusa. There is yet another medusa: She is a Gorgon daughter. If any mortal looked her in the eys, according to ancient Greek mythology, it changed into a stone statue. Perseus cut off hear head, using his shining shield as a mirror, avoiding looki...

Is finding perchlorates a big surprise? Based on a link on that page, it is both naturally occurring and man-made...and found in rocket fuel. Did the powered descent contaminate the LZ? On the website of the planetary society the next quote can be found: <<Quote: They must still rule out all other ...

iamlucky13 wrote: Anybody know what this is? Venus? Mercury?

Neither of them. The object is about 1º from the center of the sun. Mercury is over 3º, Venus even further.

Makes sense to me... the rotation speed is greater at the equator and less at the poles so I believe ejected matter would tend to travel further from the equator. I have my doubts, so lets do a "back of an envelope" calculation. According to the solar wiki the equatorial rotation is 14.18...

Henk you said, "the thermodynamic pressure of the gas will increase and eventually overcome the magnetic pressure. " Now i'm wondering, aint the magnetic field also increase as the sun compact itself and about ready to blow ensuring then that the magnetic pressure will hold just long enou...

I had similar thoughts and I think there's something to that. The corona is influenced by the sun's magnetic fields and solar wind. The corona lies between the photosphere and the solar wind. It is pretty hot: a few million K. It is basically a plasma, highly ionized, multiple electrons stripped of...

Chris, Thank you! I was hoping for someone with actual experinece of a totality to say if that is what happens. So theory and experience agree - you do see dawn's early light! Never witnessed a full solar eclipse, so can't offer you an eyewitnessreport. Have to do with satelite images. Some taken b...

Chris Peterson wrote:but the actual situation is much simpler. There's no requirement that we be viewing perpendicular to the path of the eclipse. ... So the shadow edge may only be a few kilometers away.

Right you are, the shadow edge might be that close, i forgot to mention the words "worst case".

The dark current shows as a steady increase in charge, related to temperature. This can be subtracted from the image, which is the main purpose of a dark frame. Chris, back in town, i found your reply. I have read the words "dark frame" earlier and hadn't a clue what it was. From what you...

Oh, say can you see that the dawn's early light is showing over the mountain range in the distance. If the Sun is high in the sky, with the Moon in front of it, why this dawn light? There are three kinds of dawn: Civil dawn: between sunset and the sun is 6° below the horizon Nautical dawn: the sun ...

As a rule, the example with fewer images will have better S/N. But each time you read the camera, you inject readout noise. Ah, the readout noise -thanks for learning me a new concept- breaks the symmetry. Although the readout noise limits the applicability of my camera, it leaves logic intact. The...

Some CMOS detectors store charge on capacitors. CCDs do not, they store charge in potential wells established by precise voltages on carefully placed electrode structures. It was late seventies, or early eighties that one of my educators told me about CCD's. In these days it was 'capacitors', that ...

Of the stars we can see are all of them part of the cluster, and if not how can we tell which are and which aren't? That is hard to tell, since the open cluster is in another galaxy. Like the Pleiades and Hyades in our own galaxy, they can be identified by their motion. Since they form a group of g...

Usually, the most meaningful way to define sensitivity is in terms of signal-to-noise. A low noise camera might collect half as much signal as a high noise camera (that is, the low noise camera is less sensitive to light), but it will still show more detail. Earlier this season, when the sky was cl...