Starship Asterisk*

What impressed me is that you can quite clearly see the watch strapped on the outside of his space-suit (a la the scene of the astronauts prepping for launch in Apollo 13). Does anyone know how well it held up to exposure to space like that?

Bruce's comment is correct: they picked UV wavelengths that correspond to Far UV atomic emission bands of helium and iron out of all those available from the full range of elements present deliberately. Helium, because of its abundance and the fact that it will trace out the ejections; and iron, bec...

Quote "light pressure from the Sun is causing the asteroid to rotate increasingly rapidly, which in turn causes pools of previously gravity-bound dust to spin off" Wouldn't that cause the tails to spiral, like the 'tails' of a Catherine wheel firework? John Only if the jets are constant i...

The last time I saw a diagram like that, I was playing with gear wheels and pens... that's one awfully big Spirograph! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirograph

Pinging the site admins: Your "previous" link is actually pointing to the APOD for Jan. 29th (which doesn't exist yet), while the "next" link is pointing to yesterday's page!

cxd207 wrote:Just a beautiful picture. A spirograph in space.

An awfully expensive spirograph, but still fun!

What I find interesting is his comment just before the drop: "And hopefully, they'll hit the ground at the same time ... How about that!" Hopefully? You mean they hadn't rehearsed this at least 50 times in the giant vacuum chamber back at NASA on earth? Or did he not fully believe the phys...

APOD Robot wrote:...for a brief moment, both the Moon and the International Space Station could be seen in silhouette, crossing the Sun

And there was me thinking, "Incoming Tie Fighter!!!"

Big boosters. . I didn't realize the Russians had a shuttle that appears surprisingly similar to ours, and it's already been launched twice! That was in 1988 and it only launched once, unmanned, before being canceled. In 2002 or so, that shuttle was destroyed when the hangar at Baikonur collapsed u...

Don't confuse "dunes" with "sand ripples" http://images.travelpod.com/users/imapilot/rtw-2007.1178196300.21-sand-ripples.jpg Ripples, you said? http://www.chem.utoronto.ca/~dstone/images/ripples.gif http://www.chem.utoronto.ca/~dstone/images/ripples.gif Or would you prefer rocke...

Diatomic S 2 gives the blue color to burning sulfur & the mineral lapis lazuli. S 2 emission is blue, but the blue colour of lapis lazuli is not due to S 2 ! The gold flecks you can see in some samples are pyrites (Fool's gold) i.e. from sulphide, S 2- . The blue is lazurite, an aluminosilicate...

APOD Robot wrote: Even though you may have just read an email claiming Mars will be incredibly bright tonight...

The e-mail one of my relatives forwarded to me actually claimed that Mars would be "bigger than the moon"
** sigh **

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap030106.html Dang, got the wrong quote (which is still to a neat image). I meant this one: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap990830.html That's a great image, but what is the lighter area in the top left? It looks like it's pointing straight at the moon shadow on the earth, but...

Note that the blue light from the brilliant stars dominate the color of the nebula right next to the small group of hot central stars. Further away from these hot stars, the pink color of ionized hydrogen dominates. Does the interstellar gas consist of atomic or molecular hydrogen? I would imagine ...

"Potentially intelligent species" - dolphins and humans? Are you joking? Humans are, dolphins are not, cute as they may be. After all, all they do is eat, swim, and play, while we fight terrorists, attempt to clean up massive oil spills, and argue about whether man-made global warming is ...

Is it just me, or do the two winglets on the front end make this thing look like some giant, space-fairing squid?

It's a little reminiscent of the space planes in the cover illustration on the copy of Clarke's "Islands in the Sky" I had as a kid...

This and the "Powers of 10" video make a nice progression from the one I remember as a kid - the NFB's 1968 "Cosmic Zoom" http://www.nfb.ca/film/cosmic_zoom

I wonder what the equivalent clip will look like in, say, 2020? Should be a perfect vision!