Starship Asterisk*

A visitor to the inner solar system every 70 years or so Comet 13P/Olbers ... Now on a return voyage to the distant Oort cloud ... A comet with a 70-year period isn't returning to the Oort cloud! (Wikipedia tells me that Olbers has an aphelion of 32 AU but the Oort cloud starts around 2000 AU out.)...

How often does Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks visit the inner solar system? The orbital period (P) of comet 12P/Pons-Brooks is about 71.3 years. See 12P's light curve, orbital elements, an ephemeris and recent observations at COBS, the Comet OBservation database . For me, it's been a binocular object the pa...

Do we ever get a full Venus view when on the far reaches of its Orbit? At superior conjunction, when Venus is on the far side of the Sun and typically not at much of an angular separation from the overwhelmingly brilliant solar disc, spotting the resultant "full" Venus can be difficult to...

Re Venus’ apparent magnitude: According to the predicted light curve at https://theskylive.com/venus-info#ephemeris (tap green curve to read data for a particular date), Venus was brightest on 12 July 2023. On that date, Sky Safari says it was 22% illuminated, and about 36deg from the Sun. That was...

On Saturday morning, 19-August-2023, I saw C/2023 P1 (Nishimura) visually from the New Jersey Pinelands with my 115 mm spotting scope, around the start of astronomical twilight. Of course, to the eye it was just a grayish haze, unlike the lush color of today's APOD, and there was no tail visually. I...

Wow, get a load of the 18 diffraction spikes on bright foreground star Alpha Cephei in the upper right! So, why does this TAKAHASHI FSQ-106EDX4 REFRACTOR produce 18 diffraction spikes? (I'm sure Chris has addressed this question before somewhere...) alpha cephei - alderamin.png Because the primary ...

Wow, get a load of the 18 diffraction spikes on bright foreground star Alpha Cephei in the upper right! So, why does this TAKAHASHI FSQ-106EDX4 REFRACTOR produce 18 diffraction spikes? (I'm sure Chris has addressed this question before somewhere...) alpha cephei - alderamin.png Because the primary ...

Despite the season, the splendid meteor is not a Perseid :) How can you be sure? Although the Wiki link states that the Perseids mainly only begin on July 17 and today is only the 16th, Wiki also states that in 2020 they did start on July 16! And besides that Wiki states that they actually started ...

This is the second day in a row that the "Discuss" link has been absent from the link strip below the text on the main APOD page.

Joe

This picture from NASA/Apollo 17 supposedly demonstrates both the size difference and the reflectivity (albedo) difference between the Earth and the Moon. Admittedly the Moon seems almost too small to me in the image above. The color difference is clearly off. Why is it that so much of Africa and t...

I hope one of our members can translate your post!😘 I have been looking at the picture of the day every morning for a long time, and they are very often very beautiful and informative; I know nothing about astronomy, I just like to see the photos that are offered with clear explanations, thank you ...

By the way, I believe that Petr Horalek's image shows the location of Comet ZTF as of January 26, 2023. Ann Ann, Indeed, the position of C/2022 E3 (ZTF)'s nucleus is consistent with about 01 to 02 UT on January 26, 2023. On the evening of February 6, 2023, under a nearly full Moon in the New Jersey...

Beautiful APOD, but... where are we? Does anyone recognize this star pattern? Because I don't. Can you find it in Petr Horálek's excellent image? Because I can't. Ann The position of the comet is consistent with about 22:30 UT on 23-January-2023. The brightish star between the coma and the mountain...

So where can I get a higher res version of this? I can't even find one here - https://webbtelescope.org/contents/news-releases/2023/news-2023-101. I know the APOD image is better, but where did that one come from? Scroll to the bottom of the page you linked, then under "Release Images," t...

No.1 Grandson used his Xmas present from last year, a 'NASA' telescope (about 50mm) to look at the recent full moon, and got very excited. Would this comet be too ambitious a target for an 8 year old? At around mag 10 it's a challenging object for a 50mm telescope. Even more challenging would be th...

johnnydeep, The picture was a simple snapshot taken with automatic settings and no post-processing (besides size reduction and then a labeled mouseover copy for my web page ). The iPhone 11 was mounted on a tripod, and even though the EXIF data said it was a one-second exposure, I thought it said 30...

Thanks, Joe, it makes sense. Every time I have seen noctilucent clouds, they have always been pretty much centered on Capella. The pattern and brightness of the stars in the APOD just didn't look much like Auriga to me. Ann Ann, I think you hadn't realized it's a relatively small field-of-view in t...

The comet appears to move to the upper right in this video. I guess that is an effect caused by the Earth's own rotation. Obviously the comet has a motion of its own. Does anyone know how the comet is actually moving here (even if that movement isn't visible in the video)? What are the stars visibl...

The "Tau Herculid" description is probably not appropriate for this meteor shower as the radiant wasn't that close to Tau Her as shown in the attached image of today's APOD that I labeled (the mouseover labeling of today's picture wasn't that helpful). It is pretty close to the position in...

The photographer, Jeff Dai, had a picture of the morning planet lineup (Venus, Jupiter, Mars and Saturn, plus the Moon) over this same lake as the front page at Spaceweather.com on April 24, 2022.

I would love to know more about the galaxy that showed up so fascinatingly in the first Hubble picture of Comet 21 Borisov. But I guess that that galaxy must be very faint in our skies. Ann The link in the APOD text, Hubble tracked the speeding comet , gives an identification for the galaxy, 2MASX ...

The second magnitude star Diphda (Beta Ceti or Deneb Kaitos) is also visible to the right of the tail's upper end. Roughly 8° below Diphda, a vague spot of haze marks the position of Comet 19P/Borrelly , as shown in this labeled crop of the positive APOD image. I happen to be aware of this because I...

It's Sunday, but today's picture isn't an encore presentation! However, the subject, comet C/2021 A1 (Leonard), is certainly a current topic. I had my first view of it during the lunar eclipse on November 19, 2021, from the New Jersey Pines. I was able to detect it initially about an hour before max...

But why don't you go out and take a look for yourself? Ann Indeed, and I have done so many times over the years, primarily with a 12.5 inch (318 mm) Newtonian on a Dobsonian mount. I remember the first time I saw it about 15 years ago. My friend Jeremy spotted a fuzzy patch near Mirach (Beta And). ...

"The featured high-resolution time-lapse video was captured over five nights earlier this month by a mid-sized telescope on an apartment balcony in Paris, France." Paris has a day night cycle (not to mention Jupiter rising and setting)... How did they get five days of images without being...