Starship Asterisk*

Hello and welcome, Paolo! Nice picture!

Ann

Thank you for your detailed reply, Ann. Yes, I know about dust lanes - I was just disoriented by that marvellous picture. So the actual galactic centre is near that spot in the dust lane, roughly halfway up the height of the image, where a blue star is approximately in line with a pink nebula or ga...

This flow is difficult to explain by gravitational evolution within the framework of the concordance LambdaCDM model and may be indicative of the tilt exerted across the entire current horizon by far-away ]pre-inflationary inhomogeneities.. Interesting. I have seen some speculation that the Dark Fl...

More blue stars! Me likes!



Ann

Owlice wrote: I'll take a wild stab at this and suppose there are a lot of oxygen atoms in those lobes; that that's what this image shows -- the chemical (or physical, I suppose, if one prefers) structure of the nebula. http://whatwoulddaddo.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/thelorax-whatwoulddaddo.jpg...

Wow! That Moon image is stunning! Positively otherworldly! (And it is otherworldly too, of course, but you know what I mean...)

And the Milky Way and Bryce Canyon image ain't bad, either!

Ann

Another false-color planetary nebula. Personally I can't stand them. Normally, I really feel that I understand what the color of astronomical objects signifies. In other words, I understand why things are the color they are. But when it comes to planetary nebulae, I'm stumped. Yes, I understand that...

Beyond said: I think Robert Gendler's M20: The Trifid Nebula in Sagittarius is one of the best compositions of the Trifid I have seen. I agree. Gendler manages to make this rather over-photographed object look brilliantly beautiful and fantastic. Like everyone else, I, too, love Masoud's image, whi...

I seem to remember that a probable black hole was found some years ago thanks to microlensing. It was a small, free-floating black hole, just the kind that Swainy was talking about. So yes, I'm convinced that such invisible lonely black holes exist. It would most definitely not be a good thing if su...

Art said:

You've obviously never seen a naked singularity in the flesh before

How indecent!!!! Now I think I'm a nervous wreck! Isn't there a brave politician who will start a crusade against black hole nymphomania?

Ann

Really interesting. Personally I get a kick out of young massive luminous (and preferably blue!) stars, so this is very exciting news to me. Of course, Art may be right that the seemingly super-massive stars may really be more normal stars making up binaries or multiple stars. Distinguishing the ind...

I used to be terrified of black holes, but now I'm pretty bored, actually. So the black hole of V404 Cyg may have a mass of twelve stars like our Sun. And it may be 7000-8000 light years distant. Fascinating, but dangerous? C'mon. If the Sun, which admittedly "only" weighs one solar mass, ...

You mean, Brown Dwarfs and the Seven Sky Blues?





Seven Blues!



Ann

Cesar, thank you for all your Pleiades pictures. They are all interesting. Art, thanks for your UV solar pictures. I agree that great science can be done with these images. Unfortunately they don't do much for me. If I were an astronomer, I wouldn't do solar astronomy, even though I get a kick out o...

But pardon an ignoramus here - is "the multicolored... center of our Galaxy" the area featuring five very bright stars and magenta, beige, and blue clouds, the equivalent of slighly less than one picture height from the left? And if so, what part of the region is most closely in line with...

Chris said: There is news all the time about UV astronomy. GALEX, HST, and Swift all regularly return UV images Chris, thanks for pointing out that the Swift telescope does ultraviolet astronomy on top of it X-ray and gamma ray mission. I had somehow missed its UV work, and I enjoyed exploring the S...

In a thread on another forum, there was an infrared image of the Pleiades. I complained about that image, partly because I thought it looked confusing and non-beautiful, but mostly because of the very strong focus on infrared astronomy these days, so that everything should be imaged in the infrared....

Which would you rather have, a detailed map that shows you every little street and back alley in an unknown city or a map that only shows you the busiest thoroughfares and main streets? Visible light doesn't show you "every little street and back alley." It can't -- it's blind to everythi...

I said: All right. I, too, realize that the WISE image contains temperature information that is lacking in Andreo's image. Chris replied: Not at all. Both images reveal temperature information- the IR image simply provides data for lower temperature material. Exactly. So the WISE image contains temp...

Geke said: I agree with Biddie67: the picture is grand, but the description is largely lost on me as a beginner-stargazer. I can't even be sure I've found that Dark River. I quite agree with you that the description is confusing. Take a look at the picture again. You can see a large multicolored pat...

split from http://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=19999&start=25#p127488 As for what the WISE image of the Pleiades tells us about the nebulosity around this cluster, compare it with Rogelio Bernal Andreo's image of the Pleiades and the California Nebula. I personally feel that I lea...

Unsurprisingly, I strongly dislike the WISE image of the Pleiades because it takes one of the loveliest and truly bluest naked-eye objects in the sky and turns it into something messy-looking and non-blue. Phil Plait said: One of my favorite things in astronomy is seeing a familiar object in an unfa...

According to the APOD Robot, we can see the Cat's Paw Nebula in Rogelio Bernal Andreo's image. That is not the case. The red nebula that you can see at the bottom right corner of the non-enlarged image is M17, the Omega Nebula. In the largest-sized image, you can also see M16, the Eagle Nebula.

Ann

This is an amazing image. Can you imagine how much work went into producing it? No, I can't either, but if it was easy to do something like this we would surely see many more images like this one. The fact that we don't is testimony to the herculean effort it took to make this image. It's a little c...

Do we really have anything as bright in the Milky Way as the super star clusters of NGC 4038? Yes, we do. The Milky Way itself is about the same brightness as these clusters, as are most of the globular clusters we see around our own galaxy. From those galaxies, the local globulars will look pretty...