Starship Asterisk*

Mars retrogradation loop (partial) I am french and I hope that you will excuse my poor English. Since February, I took (relatively) regular pictures of Mars to reveale its retrogradation loop. In fact, the retrogradation started on April 18th and will end on July 2nd. But to have a complet go/back/...

"...warm, rising air currents...". Is there "air" on Mars ??? ;o)

More of "time-lapses" in this video are not very natural : it is obvious that the changing sky is added on a still image of landscape, otherwise trees or flowers must be shaked by the wind. It is very different in the last sequence with the flag. I suppose that this choice was made to avoi...

@ alNilam: Wouldn't the name actually be "an Nilam"? There should be assimilation of the "l" of the article "al" to the first consonant of "Nilam". Thank you for your interest in my pseudo. We have a good book about arabian names of stars (in French of course...

Hello Ann ! The pseudo "Alnilam" is realy inspired by the Orion belt : it's the first asterism that I noticed when observing the sky during winter evenings when I was walking from the school bus stop to my home (long, long, long ago...). And then I decided to learn more about stars and con...

Ooouuupppsss ! One more :

If planets rotations could be corrected, please use their proper own speed (ex.: Moon about 27 days, Mars and Earth about 1 day, Jupiter and Saturn about 10 hours, and Sun about 25 days).

I'm french and I hope you will excuse my poor English. :wink: Few comments about this video : - why all planets except Uranus ? - why all planets with their atmosphere and Venus without ? (giant planets would be very strange without their huge atmosphere !!!) - almost all planets rotate in the wrong...

250 full moons betwen them ?!? It's almost a third sky (125°) !
I checked it in my favourite sky maps software : it's about 13°, so... "only" 25 full moons.

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap091103.html

To geckzilla and others :

Some pictures published here are quite strange in they ray-tracing !!!

Don't forget the reflection rule : the angle of reflection is equal to the angle of incidence !

In French we says "un dessin vaut mieux qu'un long discours" (about : "a simple drawing is better than long tellings"), so I tried to verify if the theory of multiple same images of the sun could be right, on the picture itself. I take a copy of the "second sun" (becaus...

To owlice :

I confirm that there is realy a reflection of the "second sun" on the sea surface. Look at the above picture (I ajusted the contrast +60%).

To luchio : My opinion is that your picture (I gained the same) demonstrate that there is obviously reflections in the picture and it's a great probe for the window theory. But I think that the "gohst image" is not a reflection of the balcony because the distance between them isn't consist...

To drollere : Why guess about the dynamic of the camera and the reflection ratio of a window ? Just mesure it ! With PhotoShop, I mesured the brightness of several points in the picture : three for each sun image as illustrated on the picture above. Black point in the limbe, blue point in the top cl...

To Green1 : Your picture is very interesting for me : by duplicating the initial sun image, you noticed also the dupication of its reflection on the sea surface but you don't remark that the sun "wings" (parts of the front clouds over-expoded) are too, and very much brighter. There is no s...

I'm not convinced by the last schema because the distance between the two glass layers is too large compared with the distance between the window and the focus point of the camera (the CCD chip) ! Before reading this post, I was just comparing the distance of the sun images in the APOD picture and o...

The "hourglass reflection" leads me to watch at the sea surface and my conclusion is quite different ! The "second sun" produces it's own reflection on the sea surface. It's obvious when the picture is lightened. So the "second sun" is far in the background, not a foreg...

I'm French and I hope you will excuse my poor English. In my opinion, the reflection trough a double glass windows is not the right explanation of this view. If you look at the first picture (in the APOD), it's obvious that the second and third suns (fainter and fainter) are behind the dark cloud/mi...