Starship Asterisk*

One could stack frames in one of several ways. Something like this: http://img139.imageshack.us/img139/2425/asteriskstacking0000000fp0.png Nice visualization Case. I'll focus on the last row of your image. White shades have characteristically a value of 192 and higher. Lets assume 192. When you add...

as outlandish as this sounds, by having the majority, if not all, of the matter ejected at the equator line. Then having the poles collapse or be gravitationally pulled inward to follow the path of the initial outward explosion. In 2003 Vincent Icke of the Leiden University published an article on ...

G'day lads,

NASA states that water on Mars has been confirmed by Phoenix' TEGA experiment. That means an end to all speculations and educated guesses about the nature of the Martian ice: CO_2_ or H_2_0.

no sir, next thing you know it’s turning into a black hole and there goes the earth and ALL the ponies. As long as the lunar mass does not change, nothing will happen. The Earth and Moon will keep revolving around each other as usual. Landing on that moon would be a pain in the proverbial anus. By ...

G'day Chris, The webcam is potentially very capable, depending on the software you use. For deep sky objects, you want to collect and stack many frames, and you want each frame to be exposed as long as the webcam will allow. Philips has some additional software packed with the cam. That is not very ...

You can use an ordinary astronomical CCD camera, or an integrating video camera. Either way, it only takes a few seconds integration time to bring out much more than the eye can see, with or without optics. Could you give me some more details please? Which brand of astronomical CCD camera? I tried ...

When looking at http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap080731.html, NGC 5216 looks a spiral galaxy, while i wonder: is NGC 5218 an elliptical system? Indeed, both are slightly crumpled. Similar strings as in todays APOD can be seen in simulations of collisions.

Dag Kees, Maybe it's my imagination, but the computer reconstructed image of the blue background galaxy looks like three galaxies close together... Yes, it looks like three spiral images. Is it real or an artefact of the image reconstruction? If you look closer at the the SLACK collection , most of ...

bystander wrote:Shouldn't that be IC1805, APOD 20080726?

Quite right. 25th is the blue pinwheel.

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Errare humane est et nil humane mihi rarum est.
 Henk

If it is ice, its thickness would be very important. How do Mars' internal temps look? Wouldn't any geothermal heat set up massive currents, such as in our magma, under the frozen surface? If geothermal currents would (still) exist on Mars, then plate tectonics must be still present. Marsquakes are...

JPG should never be used for analysis if possible. It is the only compression scheme which actually changes elements in the picture. I could not agree more. JPEGs DCT ruins the quality of derivatives. I prefer PNG or lossless TIFF. Unfortunately JPG is mostly available on the web. There are excepti...

You guys crack me up. As Thin Lizzy (the ol town) said: "This guys is cracking up, this guys has broken down". That's how i feel, when i read the description of todays APOD . An explosion which accordingto the APOD is cylindrically shaped, according to the Hubble description shaped as a '...

Here's a nice picture of Echus Chasma: Huge image Indeed, a very interesting image. Unfortunately i can not recognize the area on the apod of 20080723 so i can not say whether this image shows the same area and so whether it is characteristic for the Echus Chasma. What i see in huge image, is a pat...

I would enjoy seeing some of the images, or perhaps an inset image, of the subject in visible light. IC1805, APOD 20080725 Try this black and white image from japan. In the dark the human eye looses its ability to see in colour, so a B/W image is rather appropriate. The same website has a colour im...

I think water on Mars is going to be found to be much more prevalent than we've ever thought. And an ice surface would also show craters. That is unless Mars also goes through global warming and cooling cycles much as the Earth such that liquid water occurs every tens of thousand years and thus thi...

Why is it a given that the base of the chasm was covered in Lava? Couldn't the flat bottom be explained by millions (billions?) of years of dust accumulation? Good question. When you compare the plateau with the chasma, you will notice little or no impact craters. That suggests a relative young sur...

It is not known if Jupiter has a solid surface. How do scientists determine the mass and density if we can't probe or "see" to the core? I can ask you a similar question: "How do scientists determine the mass and density of our sun, if they can't see whether the sun has a solid core?...

On that side [Phoenix] note, they're still having trouble with the oven doors on the TEGA instrument. Yes, read about that on the JPL site . These scraping tests gave me the impression that the acquisition of a decent sample was a lot harder than anticipated, which is strange, since NASA will not l...

I found this at ESA ... more images of Echus Chasma... The crater that is prominently visible in todays APOD is not easy to find in the ESA image. The coordinates of three craters in the JPG from ESA are: The main crater is right on the lower edge: (H, V) = (260, 1495). It is hardly visible. Todays...

G'day Ed, You may be right about the false color Henk, but we usually get some mention of this in the text or resource site... my first impression was false color because of the stark contrast I haven't seen on other Mars (normal) images. went for the hirise website and found 6 images related to the...

Concerns http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080723.html Look at the section in the center line of the image, at the left side. The cliffs extending from the higher plateau to the bottom. At the edge there are linear structures, like the grains in a file. On a much smaller scale i saw similar structu...

The url has changed: http://burro.astr.cwru.edu/JavaLab/GalCrashWeb/main.html OK, thanks, the old link still works. I had wondered what happened to your galaxy crash program. Decided to not reinvent the wheel? The comparison with a wheel is OK, in the simulations of Galaxy Crash lab the orbits are ...

In reference to my wish for a 3D Universe model... guess it will have to wait a while based on the preceding debate regarding the motions of the two galaxies merging. How can anyone build a model without numbers... we need numbers like mass, trajectories, speed, gravitational force, dark matter, du...

G'day Henning, It sounds like you're misunderstanding me here. You don't need spherical symmetry to have stationarity. Different points of space can have different curvatures, but each point has to keep its curvature as time passes, forever. So stationarity in this sense is possible only in a change...

G'day Henning, I have read the first part of your reply. Our slight misunderstanding has been resolved. No hard feelings! I'll focus on the Schwarzschild explanation, which is more intriguing and opens a world to previously unknown facts. ... because GR says that the true value actually becomes infi...