Starship Asterisk*

Do you know about the various incarnations of the Tom Swift and Tom Swift Jr books? Nominally science fiction, the first two series were much more about invention and engineering. Here's a quote from their Wikipedia page ... A number of scientists, inventors, and science fiction writers have also cr...

Christ, this makes three APOD in a row on one launch. This is astronomy as a Twinkie is food. Who runs this website? The volunteers, both of them, who have run APOD since it began many years ago, choose what they wish to choose. The appropriate response is... Oh well, I'll see what they give us tom...

Tracking the Interstellar Object 'Oumuamua to Its Home Max Planck Institute for Astronomy | 2018 Sep 25 A team of astronomers led by Coryn Bailer-Jones of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy has tracked the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua to several possible home stars. The object was discovered i...

http://www.uahirise.org/images/wallpaper/800/ESP_053806_2650.jpg Lingering Frost (ESP_053806_2650) ( HiClip ) This image looks impossible!! Amazing and beautiful, but... but... :shock: After staring for a while at the original image from which this quite small clip was taken, I think I've figured i...

All the video is doing is providing annotations. Otherwise, it's an ordinary pano file already. Just pause the video (around 1 minute there's no annotation). Then you can explore the dataset as much as you want. That is, the video does not need to be playing to use the pano feature. Thank you, Chri...

Is that the only way a pano file can be viewed? https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA22545 Well yes, I know there is a flat version of the image. My question had to do with the use of a video to view the pano file, a video which has to be repeatedly restarted if you want to look at the file...

What an extremely odd experience. It's a video of a panorama, so just as you're getting engrossed in looking around, the video stops and you have to restart it. Is that the only way a pano file can be viewed?

Rob

If light from the original supernova arrived 5000 years ago, wouldn't it be 5000 light years distant? Please explain? There was lots of light arriving at the Earth 5000 years ago, some (as Chis mentioned) from our Sun, which is only about 8 light-minutes away, some from Saturn (about 1.3 light-hour...

People babble about mining asteroids, but I don't see how it could possibly be cost-effective. Could it be? Figuring out the value of asteroidal materials to Earth-based industries is not likely to strongly suggest profit. Asteroid mining will be useful and profitable (if anyone cares) when a signi...

This is one of those photos that needs a banana! The foreground "rock" could be just about any size you imagine…. Bananas are good when photographing a bonsai rock like this, but its actual size can be estimated nevertheless. Zoom into the full size image, then scroll down. You'll see dar...

26,490 light-years Or about 154,275,000 times the minimum length of a circumnavigation of the globe via sailboat (which is, by definition, 40,000 km.) You'd need a very fast sailboat. More like 6 trillion times . (25,000 miles x 6 trillion = ~25,000 light-years.) (I think you may have divided by 40...

heehaw wrote: ↑Sun Jul 29, 2018 9:42 am

star struck wrote: ↑Sun Jul 29, 2018 9:24 am for those of us non astronomers, how far is the Earth from the center of the galazy?

26,490 light-years

Or about 154,275,000 times the minimum length of a circumnavigation of the globe via sailboat (which is, by definition, 40,000 km.) You'd need a very fast sailboat.

Rob

... In 2013, Sturrock published _AKA Shakespeare: A Scientific Approach to the Authorship Question_. In this book, he lays out a method for weighing evidence which he developed for studying pulsars. Sturrock then invites the reader to apply the method to tabulate their own "degree of belief&qu...

Since GPS is easily jamable by a low power transmitter, I was thinking of a design that would use signals from the stars. I.E. pulsars or radio sources. I.E. a vertical stabilized dish with multiple detectors around the edge. Would need 3 sources within ?45? of the vertical at any position on the e...

My question is will we be inhabiting Mars someday? and if so estimation of when and how will we survive on Mars? We will certainly begin to send exploration/science teams to Mars fairly soon, as we are already planning to do. But inhabiting in the sense of families and schools, politicians and shop...

Awesome spectacle! One question though, is Antares really that yellow? I'm used to seeing it appear red to my eyes. Bruce I downloaded the image, zoomed in to 2000%, then took a screen grab of Antares and a bit of the glare around it. I think you can see from this that Antares (or its blob of satur...

This Earth crossing asteroid is being eyed for potential mining operations: As of May 2018, according to the Asterank website, operated by Planetary Resources, the current value of Ryugu for mining purposes is speculated to be US$82.76 billion , and the chemical composition of the asteroid is claim...

... if probe could trot over to cydonia the epic face on mars and pyramids may be imaged. face on mars would necessarily be imaged from ground level but its outstanding details would nonetheless be apparent. the pyramids need to be surveyed. why have the scientific community avoided this issue ?? W...

Do they do it on the image, Chris? Or is it done, somehow, in the data prior to rendering the image? -- if that question makes any sense, since digital images are all data, all the time.

Rob

I've long thought that at least the spikes--the most distracting parts, to me--could be algorithmically removed. Surely, in a field of dots that are effectively random in location, hue, and brightness, some way could be found to identify a set of radial straight lines and a bright spot in their cent...

As nice as that picture is, it would be interesting to see a view from outside our galaxy by "removing" foreground stars. Maybe software could be written to identify them (sharp points of light) then mask them off. The trick isn't so much in removing them as it is in deciding what to repl...

I recall my mother talking about duststorms back in "the dirty 30s", when she was growing up in Calgary. Huge walls of dark dust would occasionally sweep over the sity. They'd stuff anything they could into cracks below doors, and use damp tea towels to try to seal up their single-hung win...

Could such windstorms on Mars be as dangerous to astronauts as the ones depicted in the movie The Martian ? With the rarified air pressure there I doubted that massive objects could be pushed about as much as shown. Bruce I wondered that when I saw the movie, Bruce. And here's the answer... 'The Ma...

So, what is the record? Number of planets visible in whole or in part in a single, undoctored photograph. (So, today's APOD would actually be 4, by my count, because you would count the Earth in this situation.) We could add lots more terms and conditions to make this more precise, but I doubt that...

So, hypothetically, if humanity can finally grow up and learn to intelligently manage this gem of a planet in a sustainable way, then doing even very long range projects to keep the Earth in the slowly shifting sweet spot of the Sun's HZ for as long as possible only makes sense. We can only grow up...