Starship Asterisk*

Just this afternoon, while playing pool, an acquaintance who is known for his, um, alternative viewpoints, mentioned scientific evidence that the Sun is entering a cooler phase. I asked if this wouldn't mean that the Earth should also cool off. Oh it is , he said. No, it's not, I said, and then held...

You can easily find polarized results about anything if you're looking on the internet. (You can find flat earthers on the internet too, but nobody takes seriously the claim that there's a difference of opinion about the shape of the Earth.) The scientific consensus is that climate change -- by whic...

Why cast a round blank when 798 hexagonal segments are needed? Seems like building a hexagonal mold would have simplified construction. I wonder if the corners of a hex casting would cool just a bit quicker than the rest of it, causing distortion. Maybe it's just easier to get the quality of blank ...

15(base 10) = F(base 60) too.

There are lots of base conversion tools available online -- if you really have nothing else to do.

Rob

So the main debate here is about the title? No one complained about the "Planets on the Wing" APOD the other day - I surely did not see any planets on that wing!! :ssmile: Anyway, adding to the discussion, last year, when I produced my image of M31 with these red clouds, I named the image...

Errmmm... If I took a picture of the Big Dipper with some thin clouds scudding through the sky above me, would I title the picture The Clouds of The Big Dipper? I've never met-a-phor that stretched that far.

Rob

I remember reading Clarke's book that they mention here, Fountains of Paradise, when I was in high school. The whole concept of a space elevator was fascinating to me and I always hoped that there might be something to it. Given the potential for causing widespread destruction, as well as being a t...

Winter storms don't always bring snow. Here along the Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia, the storm that dumped snow elsewhere over the northeast US and the eastern provinces of Canada was just a day of near-hurricane force winds with some rain. Of course, that can have consequences too. Here's two pics,...

Mark, please note that while the Milky Way looks quite "realistic" in this picture and close to what the human eye would see, there is no way that our human eyes would see the great nebulas as intensely pink as they look in this image. Ann Nor would we see the ground looking like that in ...

There's been a major arctic air mass hanging around eastern Canada and the northeast US for the last few weeks giving colder than average temps, while yesterday and today a somewhat larger than average storm rolled up the east coast and is passing by me tonight, generally leaving a mess in its wake....

[edit] I just downloaded and installed Stylish, a popular add-on for customizing your view of particular sites. It served to remind me why the APOD page needs some rebuilding, even to make it possible to sensibly customize the style for your own viewing needs. The page has effectively no modern str...

Maybe the explanation would be more readable in a two columns format. It's difficult for me sometimes to read it in the one column format.... There have been previous suggestions to update the APOD page code, in part for exactly this reason, to make it more readable on a greater variety of screens ...

marially3@yahoo.com wrote:What are the orange dots seen in pairs at 1, 4, 7 and 9 o'clock?

I suspect they are bright star-forming regions. Their 'pairness' would be coincidental. We humans see patterns whether they're meaningful or not.

Rob

And a belated but Merry Christmas to you, Ann, from Canada.

Rob

I think the flat earthers just fill the niche that moon landing hoaxers used to fill. The moon landing folks were all the rage when Apollo was going on, but it's been long enough it's not fashionable any longer. Flat earthers can stick it to NASA in all their current research instead of just rambli...

... I notice the Kepler-90 planets are all labeled, but 'our' planets are not. I guess we can all remember our planets by the silly sentence, "My Very Enthusiastic Mother Just Served Us Noodles!" Kepler-90's planets? Hmmm... I find it even easier to remember them using this mnemonic: &quo...

How do photos collated/collaged over 8.5 hours only have one radiant point? In the same way that the background stars are not blurred -- a motorized mount is moving the camera so that it tracks the apparent sky movement, thus keeping the radiant in the same apparent location within the field of vie...

This morning, just pre-dawn, I saw Jupiter leading the crescent Moon in the east. The Moon wasn't just a crescent though, it was well illuminated by Earthshine. A little ahead of them, invisible through the city haze, my app tells me were Mars and Spica, while just below the horizon there was a crow...

Is that really what Mercury sounds like? Was this taken while inside its atmosphere because I don't know how else sound could gotten into this. After viewing this I will always remember Mercury screeching as much as some performers. You should warn people about the screeching. I am also confused --...

I'm sure there are stairs on the other side. :) Don't discount that! Seriously, I've been up on a number of peaks and outcrops surrounding Norwegian fjords. I've got pictures of me standing on things that make me look like a daring (or foolhardy) climber. In fact, a great many such spots only look ...

" ...because it is the first asteroid ever detected from outside our Solar System -" How is this possible unless Voyager1 somehow reported it? Or is this just a simple and too common grammatical error? :| It's not considered a grammatical error anymore. It is an all too common way of maki...

Okay, here's a pic of that star blown up... protoplanets.jpeg I take it you're referring to those two little pinkish-gold lines, one on either side of the central white blob. I think they will turn out to be image artifacts coming from something in the optics, but those with more experience in teles...

Thank you. We -- and that's the royal we in my case -- value the work of the moderators, and especially so in this case.

HRH Rob

geckzilla wrote:It's not that you need to use it once a month, it's that, when you start it up, it has to have an active internet connection to check in. ...

Ah, I see. Like you, I haven't computed without an internet connection for many years, so I wouldn't have noticed.

Rob

I've never heard of software checking in as you describe geck. Maybe this is not something software vendors can do on MacOS. The subscription system is used with Macs, too. Go with Photoshop CC or with Office 365, and the software will only work as long as you maintain your subscription. Geck seeme...