Starship Asterisk*

It appears that nobody told the artist about it only reflecting one percent. It should be pitch black in the painting and the moon in front of it would be invisible.

Well, if it's a meteorite, where's the crater?

"many times thinner, in relative proportion, than a razor blade." doesn't make any sort of sense. In proportion to what?

Thanks for the replies! Even the videos are obviously long exposures per frame. I am still wondering how accurately they depict actual auroras. While long exposure videos show beautiful images of a waterfall or surf, they don't really look the same as real time video. So my followup question would b...

I have only seen auroras in photographs. Can someone who has actually seen them tell me if they look the same in real life? They are apparently always photographed with long exposures (as is obvious in this case because of satellite and airplane streaks). I am just curious about whether photographs ...

Cool plane, but... no windows?

I realize that in a way it makes sense to have north to the top of the photo, however, since our eyes and brains expect light to come from the top of an image, having it come from below as in this photo fools our brains into getting our depth perception backwards. I really think it would be better t...

I see naked people around the edges. Especially in the top-left. Are you sure this isn't from an art gallery?

Is this real? Wouldn't the light on the water be reflected brightly in line with the sun, with the edges darker?

Oh dear, how embarrassing. You misspelled peek! ("...while stars Castor and Pollux peak through the tree tops...")

Kinda fits the mountain though.

I'm thinking the ripples aren't really "more apparent above the rocket," but the whole circular shape is behind the rocket and it just appears above due to our viewing angle. (And possibly it would appear as a full circle except there may not be any clouds in the "bottom" half of...

Emc: I share your awe at the size of our universe. And your analogy brings to mind my awe when I first walked into the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. Even though it contained just a small selection of the books of the entire University Library, I was so overwhelmed by th...

Neufer: Thanks for the map! I'm curious: on the map M94 appears to be more like 18 million lyrs away. Is this due to the imprecision of our knowledge of exact distances or did the author of the article round off the distance to 15 million?

Hi, everything's relative. For example, if you consider that the estimated size of the Universe is approximately 150 thousand million light years in diameter (and growing larger at an increasing rate with each passing second), then I believe many would understand why 15 million light years (or .000...

Why do so many APOD pages include expressions like "...a mere 15 million light-years distant..."? What is mere about 15 million light years? Is this a running joke among astronomers? Heck, in my book even a light year is way more than mere. Sure, I know the universe is big, but that's no e...

The reflection of the moon in the water looks out of whack. Shouldn't the moon be centered over the reflection?