Starship Asterisk*

It would have helped to label this image, as I can't tell from the text exactly what I'm looking at—confusing at best. I really like when APOD does "mouse-over" annotated images, that's a good compromise between clarity and the beautiful view without text labels. Haha, and I know you mean...

Beautiful! So we only get to see Titan's shadow on Saturn about once every 15 years, right? I was looking up in Stellarium and it looks like there will be several visible passes around this time next year.

The image is striking (pun intended). The number of Jets is a good question. It appears that there are 5 with 2 converging and one (on the right) diverging. But, I am wondering what is the bright object in the middle of the frame? to answer that we need to recognize the star field. Is there a star ...

Maybe I'm wrong, but that "jet" of material looks exactly like a low Reynolds number smoke simulation. I happen to have more than a decade of painful experience with numerical simulations of turbulence. The rule of thumb for analysis via Reynolds number is that you measure the characterist...

"a multitude of planet-dwarfing active regions"

Since dwarf planets are dwarfed by planets, by the transitive property, these planet-dwarfing regions must be dwarf-planet-dwarfing!

Another one: If it's blinking but appears too high to be an aircraft, or even more mystifying, if the blinking is irregular! - it's a tumbling satellite. Yep, and slow but steady brightness changes would likely be the giant tumbling rocket body stage left in orbit after releasing a satellite, I saw...

I was thinking what Ann has labeled object 8 is a dusty galaxy, and I thought I saw several dusty looking galaxies while zoomed into this image... but this is NIRCam, and when it takes pictures around the local milky way, it makes dust look transparent. So is this light really so distant that it use...

In a nearby alternate universe, this image shows the Olympic torch being lit at the top of the Eiffel Tower by orbital laser! Haha, I wonder what they will actually do, the 2024 summer games in Paris are just a month or two away.

If one is going to map grayscale to a color scale, why limit ourselves to just purple or orange, when we could have both? The perceptually uniform colormap "plasma" or "inferno" freely available from matplotlib might look really good, and they seem appropriately named.

"When's your birthday?"
"April 11th"
"What year?"
"Every year!"

Haha I agree it might be a little too close up. I used to do Jupiter sketching when I had access to an 8" refractor, always in black and white though, never attempted color. Sketching really adds to the observing experience, I think. Remember that blue storm that blew up briefly on Saturn? I th...

Imagine if it started ticking down: "Astronomers report giant 37 in the sky is now a 36 - wait - this just in, it's 35!" Haha, feels like something that could've been in Clarke's "Nine Billion Names of God"

You missed the "Of these" reference at the start of the sentence. I think the writer was just trying to point out that the comets and Mercury were not visible to the unaided eye. But yes, Jupiter was bright! It must be just out of frame in this image.

I saw this eclipse and the bright pink prominences were stunning, and it got me reading about H alpha emission. And after some reading, I feel betrayed by every "H alpha" filtered photo of the sun I have seen. Because the prominences appeared obviously PINK to human eyes, doesn't that mean...

I was also near Indianapolis, the thin cirrus blanketing the entire multi-state area made comet viewing likelihood near zero. The comet's position was about at 10 o'clock with respect to the sun from that location. Venus was bright, Jupiter was visible, and the prominences and corona were still stun...

I've always loved this image, but I feel compelled to make a "well, actually" comment, please forgive me, but I don't think the word "coincidence" is appropriate and instead one could conceivably substitute "inevitable" because of the caveat that we have a Full Moon, no...

A key phrase here is "aerosol susceptibility" because broadly speaking, there is a large contrast from land to ocean for the amount of particulate matter floating in the air - aka the aerosol concentration is much higher over land than over the ocean. So running your SUV does not cause thi...

I plan on shooting images around local noon on the 21st, which for me will put them in the southeastern sky just past their point of being closest (which is slightly before they rise for me). Both of these objects are plenty bright to be telescopic objects in full daylight. I'll go for wider field ...

Has anyone ever been able to take a shot capturing all six of our system's largest moons (plus Jupiter and Saturn of course) in the same frame? Such a photo opp might have been possible back in April. If you're up late in the coming nights, you may want to pay attention to the waning gibbous moon —...

+100 points to whoever came up with "arachnologically correct"

The majority, perhaps all researchers who study weather and climate phenomena on other planets and moons were either conventionally trained meteorologists who transtitioned to this type of planetary science, or atmospheric physicists who did so. Of course, some of them now have students who are ent...

I would like to defend the position that meteorology and astronomy (and history!) are different fields. Of course they are (well, history doesn't fit here simply because it's not a branch of science). Meteorology is a subdiscipline of atmospheric and oceanic physics, which is also a subdiscipline o...

If I find a flint arrowhead, I assume the ancient archer is not nearby. If I decipher a neutrino in Sudbury, I assume the generating entity is not in the mine. In other words, because one perceives astronomical evidence does not allow one to classify it a s current events. That is why I disregard t...

I would like to defend the position that meteorology and astronomy (and history!) are different fields. Perhaps we are all trying to express the importance of the history of the separation of scientific fields. I am a meteorologist and I appreciate APOD's expression of the fuzziness between these fi...

That's a fun picture. This is a fun one! There's an element here of the photographer "playing" with the light, and I think it's lovely! Seeing this comet and solar system light in the presence of such ancient light; it's like hearing a quick flute melody fitting perfectly with the deep no...