Starship Asterisk*

Here is the image used for the bottom half of this construct:
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap101121.html

The blue star embedded in the cloud near the bottom of the picture (north) is Pismis 24-13. It is an O6.5 main sequence star, slightly cooler than the three brightest stars in the photo, but still around 40,000K. The brightest star is the barely resolved double (actually at least triple) Pismis 24-1...

Chris, although I agree with the sentiment you express, your calculations are not quite correct. I didn't show any calculations... You didn't have to, but if you'd given the right answers I would have been unable to tell whether your calculations were correct ... or wrong and you just got really lu...

Chris, although I agree with the sentiment you express, your calculations are not quite correct. The difference over a very long period between the largest apogee and the smallest perigee is about 14.1%. However it is untrue to say that the May moon diameter was 14% larger than other moons in 2012 s...

As a newby here, are there any theories why these globular clusters haven't formed into galaxies (yet?). Or why all galaxies haven't formed into globular clusters ? Or are they galaxies, and not discernable as such... ? Ron, they're too small. Globular clusters are thought to form as part of larger...

I'm slightly surprised at the statement "astronomers use the abundance of stars like blue stragglers to help determine the age of the globular cluster". Certainly they use the abundance of stars of different colours to determine the age of the cluster, as shown by Ann's diagram and also th...