Starship Asterisk*

At this point in time, I have a much deeper appreciation of the Apollo 13 situation and that they made it safely back home than I did when it was actually happening.

What is up besides the Sun? I am so discombobulated. In my head, I know that the Sun is not rising or setting… or up and down... but is plowing through the Local Interstellar dust cloud, orbiting the Milky Way at about 486,000 miles per hour… And the Earth is rotating causing the day and night… I k...

(( still laughing )) That man sure keeps one on their toes ... I can't help but wonder, when in the future of space-based urban sprawl, what the favored designs of condos, individual homes, space-golf resorts, gambling resorts aka Las Vegas, traffic routes and the like will will look like. The above...

(( good laugh .... ))

People just don't build buildings like they used to - thank goodness the universe has its own independent architects.

Thanks so much for the above links - I'm embarrased to admit that I didn't know that they existed. I was wondering why there needed to be such critical cooling of the satellite and its equipment - these links were really helpful with all their info. They were also written in such a way that I genera...

Today's APOD is just wonderful - I keep coming back to look at it another time. On the subject of owls - real ones, not the good contributor above - I live out in a forest area that has a couple different kinds of owls living in it. The great horned owls are the ones that I'm mentioning here. They d...

Simply magnificent!! I've seen several references to the wave lengths of the 2 remaining infrared channels but I don't think that I have come across a picture taken before the "warm" phase started and a reference to the liquid helium cooled channel's wave length (I apologize if I'm not say...

Thanks for the info. I'm assuming that the little red solid fuel rocket was susposed to pull the manned capsule away from the primary rocket ?? I'm surprised that the forces involved in the launch didn't twist, torque, bend and/or snap that framework off ..... or even cause some kind of guidance pro...

Wonderful photographs - and such an interesting contrast between the worlds of fantasy and science.

Disney himself couldn't have staged a more marvelous cloud arrangement for his castle ....

owlice wrote:The clouds look (nearly) like tragedy and comedy masks.

They do!! I didn't see that on my first look - I just saw all the colors so I went back to look again - good imagining!

But I did notice something else - are those antenas on top of the 2 rockets on the right? If so, what are they used for?

Again - distances and sizes of objects in space are so hard for me to get my mind around - that object, which looks like a closeup of a potato that has had a hard life, is some 100 kilometers long ....

What is the difference bewteen a moon and a shepard moon?

neufer -- I burst out laughing at your bit of historical/hysterical info above - this one is certainly a keeper!! owlice -- I like the term "shadowrise" also - thanks for the link to the older APOD. As a rather recent discoverer of APOD, I am slowly getting into savoring the older APOD's a...

Thanks folks for trying to answer my questions - sorry they seemed rather fuzzy .... Amir - I assumed the 22 degrees mentioned in the description referred to an angle of 22 degrees from a viewer's perspective on Earth between the moon and the moondog. Chris - The rings that I was referring to were a...

If the cloud cover were consistent all around the area of the moon, could a circle of reflected light be seen at that distance? I've seen circles around the moon before but they were a lot closer than the 22 degrees described above - can the ice-crystals vary enough in their positions to cause the d...

(( laughing )) just love it !!!!!!!

The sun ray phenomenom through the gap in this crater wall seems to hold the same fascination as the positions of the sun's light through openings in ancient temples did to those ancients .... only this one on the moon was created by natural forces - not by man.

(( chuckle )) Lord of the Whimsey, for sure!!

Case wrote:

Evenstar wrote:Why have the blank areas in the upper right not been filled in?

Here's an explanation by the Hubble team.

Case: thanks for the link to the Hubble explanantion - I had also been wondering why so many pictures from the Hubble looked this way ...

Mr. Neuendorffer: I'm confused - I know the whimsy is probably lost when you try to explain the relationship of your altered Mandelbrot_and_Julia picture to today's APOD but ... help? Is your horizontal center line somehow representing the "terminator" line between the light and dark sides...

What a magnificent view of NGC 2442 and peeks of all the other galaxies out there. I'm not complaining here but I do wish that Hubble could have been allowed to record more of the extents of those two spiral arms .... what a tease ....

jbmetz: thanks for the question -- I was wondering the same thing.

(( chuckling )) loved the excellent survey up top .....

Does the pink in the picture represent an average temperature along the galaxy plane that is inbetween the other 2 temps quoted?

And thanks to kjardine for pointing out that wonderful website!

Neat stuff - thanks ....

Years ago, when I was looking for a home to purchase, I purposefully looked for a house that was EAST of where I worked. That way the rising sun was at my back both when driving to work in the AM and returning home in the PM - sure saved wear-n-tear on my eyes over those years. Amir - I found the de...