Starship Asterisk*

This is one of those photos that needs a banana! The foreground "rock" could be just about any size you imagine….

OK.... but then so are my eyes when I look at the sea, and it looks flat.... are you saying that any image of the sea will, unless the camera is held dead upright, will display the horizon in a similar way? I'm going on Google images to look..... ...[later] ok, you win! :) Mind you, it's (surprising...

But... why is the sea-horizon not flat?! ( I don't mean horizontal - that's just the way the camera was held - but it isn't straight.)

[E=mc²] results from a simple extension of that same Pythagorean Theorem

hmm... it's also an extension of 1+1=2, but I digress... what I came to say, re the main picture, was... those bloody seflie-sticks get everywhere!!

Excuse my ignorance, but what does "Cones Active" mean?

Yes, Fred, but in the mirror universe, do bananas bend the other way?

I wanna banana! (For scale - how big is this blasted thing?)

And, do mirrors there reverse only up and down and not left and right?

banana for scale required....

So what's the inset at bottom-left meant to be?

Chris v spider72: it's simple enough to resolve - presumably APOD know who the photographer is. So grab him (her), and waterboard them until they confess or die. If they die, we can presume the photo is real. If they confess, we drown them for wasting everyone's time. Now can someone please answer m...

Does anyone know what that rectangular formation in the rock at lower left of the photo is?

Great image - this (or rather, the original in '95) was the first image I ever downloaded/saved from the Internet to my hard drive!

majer wrote:Hi

I would like to ask, whether the scale shown in the picture is correct? Ganymede and Titan have diameter bigger than 5000 km, so in my opinion this line segment length should be 2000 km at least.

I think it should be miles, not kilometres

My interpretation is that blue dot is just to help locate the red arrow which points at the location of our galaxy - except that there seems to be nothing there where it's pointing! Perhaps our galaxy is too small to show, or else it's just not positioned very accurately? Whatever, it would be nice ...

Lovely photo - shame it's been spoilt by a silly white border someone's seen fit to add...

Oh, wow... I'm in love!

I'd say four worlds anyway - let's not forget the world of the imagination (of the photographer)

<sings>
When moon hits your eye-O
Like a big pizza pie-O
It's an Io.....
</sings>

It's fasscinating to ponder what the night sky might look like to a being on a planet orbiting a small star somewhere towards the inner edge of the outer ring....

Yes, congrats to all - and thanks for the pictures! I have copies of every one, including screen-grabs of a still from every video - and a new desktop image every day

Whenever I look at an image like this - of any galaxy that looks similar to our own - I always imagine a small star somewhere towards the outer edge, that has a few planets orbiting it.. and on one of these sits a being gazing at an image taken by one of their astronomers of a far-away galaxy that l...

If you say so... my money's on dirt on the lens... (now you know why I haven't got any!)

Am I the only one who cannot see a tree, waiting patiently or otherwise? (Don't tell me: it's behind the bear!)

What's this: a moon or a pizza?



Reminds me of the old song:

"When the moon hits your eye-O
Like a big pizza-pie-O
It's an Io!"

Very pretty and interesting and all, but... not really astronomy, is it? If the fact that it's partly down to light from the sun, I could post a picture of my cat and call that astronomy too. (Well, if I had a cat, that is... maybe I'd do better to post a picture of a laden dinner table and call it ...

A slightly silly question, maybe, but... If light/information was transmitted instantaneously, how different would the night sky look? e.g, would the Big Dipper still look like it does to us, or would it be a different "shape"? Presumably some stars known to be near the end of their life w...