Starship Asterisk*

Science Friday just interviewed Brown and Batygin: http://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/s ... anet-nine/

They said the best bet is that you would be looking towards it in the November sky, I think at midnight. That would be centered at RA 3h or 4h or so.

Since it is still unknown where (if) it is, and it sits well beyond Pluto, what are the odds of it being intersected by New Horizons as that little probe traverses the Kuiper Belt? That's the kind of question I like! New Horizons is headed next to 2014 MU65, which in Jan 2019 will be at about RA 19...

Epic video - kudos to Erik Wernquist! Link to his page on it is http://erikwernquist.com/wanderers/ That site has a gallery with some still images from the film, which are labeled with their locations: http://erikwernquist.com/wanderers/gallery.html Here are the names of the ones you can click on th...

Yes, there are workarounds, but they are tedious: clicking < and > (back and forward), or filling in the date by hand. So alberto / chanio's point is still very well taken. I've thought the same thing for years, every time I do the < > trick. It is so silly. Nearly all blogs today have permalinks, a...

A beautiful, compelling image! So I really want to know more about this. In the Flickr discussion, the poster Max R writes a bit about the photography: "The aurora was very active for about 25 sec and moved from the right to the left. I had noise reduction set to off in order to keep shoot with...

I would love to see the enormous radio lobes from Cen A in the context of the visible night sky. There is a great image suggesting how big they are here: CSIRO astronomers reveal a ‘blue whale of space’ | CSIRO http://www.csiro.au/~/media/CSIROau/Images/Space%20Planets%20%20Stars/TelescopeAndCentaur...

I'm puzzled by the name M2-9. It looks like a mislabeled Messier object at first. It doesn't seem that Minkowski discovered a whole catalog worth of objects, such that they would need a two-level naming scheme. The numbers are single digits, and don't seem to label the RA Dec or that sort of thing, ...

How close do you have to be to a small-to-typical black hole before the whole sky is visible near the Einstein Ring? Can anyone point to some pictures of that sort of limiting case?

I love these! But they are very hard to watch. They date from about 1993, and the technology of simulation animation has advanced amazingly since then. The ones from Andrew Hamilton are also nice, but still date from 1998 it seems. Are there any modern versions by others with higher resolution, more...

I heard about APOD before Google or Facebook existed, before most teachers knew what the web was, before mobile phone apps or blogs existed, when Justin Bieber wasn't yet potty trained. It was way back in the beginning, 1995 or so, and I don't remember exactly how, but I'm guessing via the NCSA What...

Another reference to the magnificent jets of Centaurus A is in today's paper: Kate Becker: Supermassive black holes may not be such bullies after all - Boulder Daily Camera It reminds me that what I'd like to see is this image overlaid on the real star / constellation background. But the best I've f...

More images in the sequence are linked to from here by Ben: http://www.slackerastronomy.org/wordpress/2011/07/iss-view-of-space-shuttle-atlantis-going-home/ Based on the cloud patterns in view, it seems (and makes sense) that the station is catching up to the shuttle as the latter is slowing down in...

The moon, by the way, is at 15 37 58.45 -20 48 46.0 and 1.22571799940636 AU, so about 7.5 minutes of arc separation from the earth - easy visual-eye, it would seem. If you ask Horizons for the Moon's coordinates, it gives you things like the angle between the Moon and Messenger, as seen from the Moo...

Good job, alter-ego! I came to the same conclusions, and got coordinates from the JPL Horizons system (http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?horizons). The time of the picture is more like 8:00 UTC on May 6, and Horizons says the earth was at R.A. 15 37 27.02 Dec -20 47 26.1 and distance 1.22525823308655 AU then...