Starship Asterisk*

Aha! It's not as simple as I was led to believe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_nucleosynthesis That wiki article shows a picture of the innards of a red giant just prior to supernova. There be sulfur in the silicon shell. (I'd go back to school and sit in on some physics lectures, but I've f...

Ditto; what starsurfer said. I learned the supernova onion sequence, that is, the elements that fuse starting with hydrogen fusion to iron, which can't fuse due to insufficient energy leading to a big badaboom: H, He, C, O, Ne, Mg, Si, and finally Fe. In the Periodic Table of Elements, hydrogen fusi...

Here in the Sonoran Desert, we have coyotes that start whooping it up at moonrise. I didn't know that the Atacama Desert could support feral donkeys. There is another bright spot above Venus, making three lights from dimmest to the Moon (Alice). Er, what is it;;;? Use the ; Chicago Manual of Style ;...

The concentration of carbon dioxide as measured from a mountain observatory in Hawai'i displays a continuously rising function when plotted concentration vs time. The same evidence is stored in seabed core samples showing the current increasing rate since the beginning of the industrial revolution w...

TRVTH

Although a windshield washer system was omitted due to budget constraints, why can't the rover put each pair of panels in turn vertical, maybe even clap the tips together to shake off the dust? Seems the two roving rovers could go pull the third out of the sand trap, shake the dust off each other, t...

Also, Psnarf, you have out Psnarfed yourself. We aim to interest, elevate, and/or amuse. I was worried that some of the references were somewhat obtuse. There exists people who have never watched an episode of "Star Trek - Deep Space Nine" so they wouldn't know that "Quark" is t...

https://www.sdss3.org/surveys/boss.php Yes, Boss! In a far, far away place, a long, long time ago, da U propagated sound waves that left imprints on the cosmic microwave radiation? Wow, heavy! Sure, no problem. Them pesky baryons must have been pretty active back then. A wimp and a wino walk into a ...

Thank you for urging me to get smarter on Neptune. I did not know that Neptune has six rings. There are clumps of dust in those rings that make them appear to be arcs. Perhaps those rings are in the early stages of formation? Maybe someday the rings will have a more uniform density. I've given up me...

Rather than get googled, you can download your own copy at archive.org.

https://archive.org/details/LeVoyageDansLaLun
https://archive.org/details/ATripToTheMoon20Fps

etc: https://archive.org/search.php?query=%2 ... %20Moon%22

I was surprised by the complex geometry. No, really! This image shows those long fingers around the outer edge of the inner disc. It's as if new stars are being born before the source star finishes fusing the remaining elements. I'd like to encourage more long-exposure images like this one. Australi...

KP=11 might be seen in Florida. [auroractivity, auroroactivitation: from the Latin aurora usually translated as "dawn"] http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/rt_plots/pro_3d.html From http://spaceweather.com This ongoing radiation storm ranks S2 on NOAA storm scales. It is rich in "hard" prot...

"Striking images of a young supernova brimming with fresh dust have been captured by a telescope in the Chilean desert."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25633545

Thank you, Chris! Just because the orbital origin of a fireball appears to be a closed ellipse, that fireball may be the only object in that trajectory. I was worried about the ISS astronauts, who would be busy making repairs every day if there were any more debris in all of those calculated orbits....

Every day http://spaceweather.com displays the orbits of fireballs calculated from the all sky network of cameras. Some days have over 30 fireball orbits. The parabolic-shaped orbits are probably known comet dust trails. The rest appear to be asteroid-related, with orbits reaching as far as the spac...

Looks more like a captured asteroid than a moon.

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Throughout the New Year, may you and yours enjoy Health, Happiness, and Prosperity!

I don't know what was in those brownies she gave me for breakfast on that reservation west of Santa Fe, but that's what I saw a half hour after eating them.

Sure hope my heart is in better shape than Ligeia Mare!

Aha! So that's the real mission of the Chinese rover: hunt down ideal locations for platinum mines!

About 1-o'clock from M4, there appears to be another globular cluster just inside the dust cloud. Is that NGC6144?

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Obquote: "Poof!" -Ison, ex comet.

Please CORRECT the PDF file for the SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE link which unfortunately points to an IDENTICAL file as the NORTHERN HEMISPHERE link. You have TWO different links, but the FILE at both is identical. Methinks you viewed the page without logging into your account. Anonymous guests are assigne...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PerseusCloudMap.png [switching between the full-size APOD and this map...my head exploded again]
That's a big cloud!

Got me! I should have read the caption before trying to figure out what's up with that.
There's a red monster reminiscent of the one in "Forbidden Planet" that I was going to highlight before learning it's all smoke and mirrors.

Thank you for helping purge my data banks of false information. I wasn't aware of how ubiquitous these sorts of patterns are in fluid dynamics. With that huge ball called Saturn spinning around once every ten hours, I'd posit that it is fast enough to generate that pattern. I'd expect it to appear a...

Is it serendipity that we are looking into the cave, or would the image appear pretty-much the same from another direction? That is, if the nebula is about the same thickness all around, or are we lucky that the hole is aimed our way? Would it appear similar if our Sun was on the other side of our g...