Starship Asterisk*

Beautifully asymmetric. No spirograph-drawing seen. Actually, as I understand it, it is exactly like a spirograph, or like the epicycles that astronomers used prior to Galileo when they assumed the Earth was the center of the universe . Here, I believe after a few weeks of looking, thinking and tal...

How big was the one with the "blue streak"? In fact, one was discovered in 1998 as the long blue streak in the above archival image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope Also, it seems to curve, suggesting an ellipse as per Newton's laws. What are its focal points? (What is it orbiting? -- t...

This is Peter, who started the question (and thanks for all your replies): It would be good if we could see the image [as] a transparent sphere that showed where the sun was .... Can that be done for this picture [of The Magellanic Stream], which I take is a flat representation of a spherical view, ...

This is some thanks to Art Neuendorffer for the illustration http://www.csiro.au/news/mediarel/mr1998/mr98194.html which shows that the "halo" is 2-D, and that it is perpendicular to the plane of our spiral galaxy. It is not what I expected. It's also interesting that the two (LMC and SMC)...

Hi: I assume the "halo" of the Milky Way is a sphere the surrounds the flattened, spiral disk that is the Milky Way. As opposed to a 2-dimensional halo around the spiral. It would be good if we could see the image projected upon a solid sphere (or upon a transparent sphere that showed wher...

Hi: I just took the 1st lesson, which was nice, and I ran powerpoint in the background to bring up the slides to be the size of my screen (using <F5> to run). The little video did not get bigger using <ctrl><F2> or <ctrl><F3> as one commenter said, but that may be because the media changed in the in...

I notice that the bottom of the left crater is "flat". Can that be because it hit a different density layer of the moon, so it did not penetrate evenly as a spherical imprint? Is it the same depth as the crater on the right, which would confirm that there are a bunch of shells/bands of dif...

This is what I wanted : an annotated version of the photo. Thanks! I requested it a few months ago in Sep2009: I'm about 60 years old, and with 2 MIT degrees. I love reading APOD every day. But sometimes, I can NOT figure out what you guys are pointing at. Is there some way, even a wikipedia type w...

I like apodman's re-saying of my idea in the appropriate technical parlance. Thank you. And then he volunteers. Cool. I guess the layers could be numbered so that we could remove or add them sequentially. APOD wiki. The graphic anyone can annotate. Make it multi-layered so annotations can be selecte...

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap090914.html I'm about 60 years old, and with 2 MIT degrees. I love reading APOD every day. But sometimes, I can NOT figure out what you guys are pointing at. Is there some way, even a wikipedia type way, that someone can annotate the stars? E.g. with the "The Center ...

The picture is dazzling, but confusing. I wish I could see it in 3-D, or at least conceptualize it that way. Like, it is puzzling to me that the sun moved, but the analemma http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analemma seemed to bring a little more sense into it. I guess I'd like to see a box or a sphere, a...