Starship Asterisk*

It is so difficult to find good timber any more. The newer piles are a lot thinner than the original ones. The only second-growth forests I know of are in protected parks, towering over a hundred feet overhead with trunks you can't put your arms around. Perhaps if that kind of lumber were used at th...

Was the 600km/s speed adjusted to account for space-time expansion? My guess is that since space-time expansion is constant in all directions, it would not affect the speed relative to the CMB. quo vadis - where are you going (present indicative singular) quo vadimus - where are we going (present in...

I really need to get someplace dark enough to see that again. In my yoot it was dark enough in the Adirondacks to see the entire arch, but along came light pollution.
Somebody better get a tech out there, the dish is leaking galaxies.

Weather balloons sent aloft during twilight will reflect the sun when they get high enough. When such objects are moving directly toward you, they appear stationary. However, rivers of air can criss-cross, causing the balloons to rapidly change direction. Then when they get to a jet stream, off they...

Hmm, we're looking at photons that left the theater 8,000 years ago. We'd never know when the doomsday event occurred, so "Don't Worry, Be Happy!"
PS You'll recognize me as the guy in the lead suit.

http://www.nature.com/news/nasa-might-n ... rs-1.15289

Where do I sign up to volunteer for converting that data? I'd set up a Spitzer@Home server for distributed data conversion. Maybe build a supercomputer out of hundreds of Raspberry Pi boards?

Doctor Adam Block created that image with a 32" telescope? LRGB = 7:3:3:3 I don't know what that means. The grayish haze is probably the result of high-altitude dust. Tucson had some rip-snorting wind storms blowing in from Texas last month, 50mph+ gusts and all. Could be high altitude smoke fr...

Approximately how many stars are generating the stellar winds and radiation that energize the visible nebula? 44-Trillion miles is quite a distance for energized particles to travel in order to knock electrons off of some interstellar clouds. (assuming a 7.5 light-year radius)

What is the radius of the faint halo cloud? More than eight light years? The referenced article in the referenced APOD link, http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1985PASP...97..780F&link_type=ARTICLE&db_key=AST&high= describes distances from the star in parsecs. The o...

Is one who uses the term Oriontated an Oriontater? Can one make fries from an Oriontater, or O'tater salad? Sez here Oriontaters taste best when picked while Orion is directly overhead.

Definitely well worth the wind chill exposure! Trying to get orientated, if orientated is the word for which I'm searching, on the horizon, is that Humphrey's Peak right of center? The glow on either side would be Flagstaff? The faint glow to the left, between the pillar and tree, could that be Phoe...

Boy, is my face red. Can't even read my own references. Although the surface pressure is much greater than 1000 bars (A Jovian walks into a thousand bars...forgot how the rest of it goes.), the surface isn't all that dense, contrariwise I. Surface Pressure: >>1000 bars Wind speeds Up to 150 m/s (<30...

It is my understanding that Jupiter is composed mostly of hydrogen. Its mass is about 317.8 Earths, or 1.8986×1027 kg. http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/jupiterfact.html The heat and pressure down below creates metallic hydrogen, a kind of slippery fluid similar to mercury, which genera...

Van Gogh "Starry Night"? If you go to the Van Gogh wiki page, there is an image of "Starry Night" 30,000 × 23,756 pixels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Van_Gogh_-_Starry_Night_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg Therein you can zoom into the stars and examine how the paint was applied ...

Is not that the thing into which Commodore Decker piloted the U.S.S. Constellation?

TRVTH

Metric: "a mathematical function that associates a real nonnegative number analogous to distance with each pair of elements in a set such that the number is zero only if the two elements are identical, the number is the same regardless of the order in which the two elements are taken, and the n...

In the large image, there are two features left of center that appear to be fractals. It looks to me like something started from the left side, washed down left to right, and settled in that playa on the right edge. You won't trick me into commenting on the giant 'H' above the far left side, nope, d...

Someone put for the proposition that a photon is neither a particle nor a wave, but a cloud of probability amplitudes. The cloud gets as wide as the two slits, then parts of it goes through both slits. The wavelike pattern at the receiver end of the box depends on the time interval to a spot from ea...

I once read a paper in the computer science category that described how some programmers in India wrote a program in BASIC. I don't understand how that paper could have appeared in any peer-reviewed journal. Had that paper crossed my desk, I would have reached for my red WD stamp before finishing th...

Does not quality trump quantity? Suppose you multiply each post by a number between 0-100 suggesting an arbitrary qualitative judgement, then add them up. I imagine Dr. Neufer would remain near the top, what about the rest? [Disclaimer: This post will not be included in any quantitative or qualitati...

Does the fact that Earth plows through the debris trail Halley left behind suggest the possibility, however remote, that the two could meet? As the Earth moves (wasn't that a soap opera?) through the debris, how does that affect the nearby particles? Is there a small stream of particles now followin...

Remarkable! Now, where'd I put my copy of Strunk & White? Thesae and peer-reviewed papers conform to the Chicago Manual Of Style, contrawise image blurbs. There be space monkeys inside that mansion! Whatever you do, don't send Rover over (?) to knock on the door. We do not yet understand Martian...

Methinks Dr. Fun started the "Save The Peeps" movement. http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-Fun/collections/peeporama/peeporama-2.html http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/ar00512.htm http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-Fun/collections/peeporama2003/peeporama2003-3.html There's a lot more in his archive. One...

Consider the center of mass of each galaxy connected via a rubber band. If you speed up the clock, you'll see the centers zip past each other until the rubber band is fully stretched, then back again. Off-center, they will not collide during this cosmic dance. Bad analogy, but it's a start. The indi...