Starship Asterisk*

Uh, WOW! We've come a long way during the past couple of decades. Saturn somehow appears to be solid. Still brushing up on fluid dynamics to try and understand that wacky hexagonal flow going on near the pole. Perhaps the axis of rotation in the upper atmosphere does not coincide with the rotation o...

Suitable APOD for the Halloween Season: the Cave Nebula Wizard.

I imagine that if you put neutrons under sufficient pressure/temperature, they'll decompose into Higgs bosons. Perhaps that is what's going on in the center of neutron stars? Add a proton to an atom, you get a different element; add a neutron, you get a heavier isotope. Seems neutrons may carry more...

Uh, WOW! There's a lot going on in there.

You can see that rip-snorting typhoon Usagi between Taiwan and Hong Kong, as well as Pabuk following it at the edge of the disc. (It wasn't covered on the Weather Channel because they couldn't afford to send a L.L.Bean model over there to try and remain upright in 120mph winds. I imagine a drop of r...

"These images are also at least twice as sharp as what the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) can make because the 6.5m Magellan telescope is much larger than the 2.4m HST." https://visao.as.arizona.edu/ They converted a 36" broken mirror into a 35.5" secondary mirror with complex adap...

I advocate the inclusion of such weather-related images. Astronomy is not all about phenomena outside our solar system or above the atmosphere. We need to take a look around down here once in a while. Images such as the above give us pause. I might not be a smart idea to open the observatory domes a...

A thousand kilometers per second?!
Took a minute or two to get over that movie. The pulsating nebula resembles a beating heart. Had to stop it in the middle. I must have read one too many Edgar Allen Poe stories in my youth. "The Tell-Tale Nebula."

The Hubble site encourages folks to dig through the huge number of images to find interesting images. There aren't enough astronomers to even scratch the surface of the gazzillion images. The famous astronomer from the University of Arizona whose images frequenty grace the APOD site does just that. ...

http://messier.seds.org/more/m051_rosse.html I assume the glow is not reflection or emission from dust and gasses interacting with a central star, but is actually made of unresolved individual stars? There appears to be a similar galaxy to the bottom left of NGC5195. (In the enlarged version, that ...

Bigfoot the Pirate. Bigfoot footprint on left, wooden leg impression on right?

Must be time for my medication....

Sulu, reverse engines....Slowly!

I will probably never understand the fluid dynamics going on up there. To make matters even more difficult, there is some kind of relationship between gamma rays in the ionosphere and the triggering of lightning bolts, after which them pesky red sprites and elves, and blue jets show up. https://en.w...

Minus 15 points: Use of passive voice.

It is so convenient having a star close enough to study in such detail. Magnetic coronal loops, a coronal hole so close you can peek inside (using a satellite from a safe distance), can't see that stuff on other stars. It staggers my imagination to know that the loops are only visible in the ultravi...

[Somehow I knew there'd be a reference to the Coneheads in here.] Just wondering about the density of the dust. From 2500 light years, it appears to be very dense, but you can probably drive a spaceship through there without hitting a single particle. Is the subject is answered in the FAQ, tutorials...

Go find your helmet.
Put your helmet on.
Run for your lives!
It's the Andromeda Strain!

Siriusly, nice superposition!

:cry: Urban light pollution appears to be a global problem. Forty years ago, it was easy to find dark places for watching comets and other celestial wonders near Tucson, AZ. Probably why they built so many telescopes on Kitt Peak. Even then, however, you could see the glow from Phoenix a hundred mil...

That's me waving, third row, second from the left.

Someone had a bad hair day!

Wonderful portrait. There's a lot going on in there, it's only a still-life on canvas. Kudos to the artist!

Resembles volcanic pumice or cinder ejecta. If so, the craters are popped gas bubbles. How to get volcanic ejecta that big and that high must have been a big badaboom, or perhaps an impact event.

Puffy!
Is the bluish cloud surrounding the puffytidatous wish sandwich unresolved stars, or glowing gas/dust?

[A wish sandwich is two slices of bread and you wish you had some meat in it.]

Wimpy

I'm reminded of a Swiss study from the early 70's(?) which measured high concentrations of carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (and lead) in snow deposited 1/4 mile on either side of high-traffic thoroughfares, such as interstate highways and autobahns. Measured concentrations tapered off ...

9.77 million hours = 407,000 days = 1115 years ...does that include leap years and round-off errors? The jet in the image would not be able to fly on the surface of the star, the distance of one circumnavigation might need to be adjusted to the altitude of the edge of the corona. Of course, the dis...

The Sun must have came to light in such a stellar nursery. Has that gas and dust dissipated so we can no longer detect it?