Starship Asterisk*

Not looking good in south central Alaska. It's overcast at just over 4 hours before start. Hopefully it will burn off this afternoon.

Thanks Ann, for the life of me I could not remember what star that was. Although I can't see any of the southern sky now, when I was in the Navy I often spent considerable amounts of time where I could. So many things to see, even with just binoculars.

Lucky me-the entire eclipse will be visible in Alaska. If I'm up at 5:00 on a Saturday morning...and it's not overcast (doubtful on both.) No chance of selenelion for us though. This close to the solstice sunrise here is currently about 10:00 a.m.

Even though I live in Alaska now and see them fairly often, the most spectacular aurora I ever saw was in Washington state 30 years ago. That was the only time I have ever seen the brilliant red.

biddie67 wrote:Is the designation of "PTF 11kly" a permanent label? How did the "kly" part get added to the label - does it have any particular meaning other than possibly the order in which the SN was discovered?

I keep reading it as "likely".

The ice is melting because it's the middle of August. It happens every year. Speaking of which, this seems like a strange time of the year to do research on the auroras. I guess the location is more hospitable in the summer but at the high latitudes there is still a lot of daylight.

Alter-ego-

Thanks for the interesting link. That explained a lot.

I don't want to be morbid, but what would happen if one these dust grains traveling at 60 kilometers per second was to strike the space station? Even if the mass is small, that's a lot of velocity.

According to the wikipedia link at 61 degrees N I live in the perfect zone to see these clouds, but if I have, I didn't realize what I seeing. I see it also says they are best when the Sun is between 6 and 16 degrees below the horizon. At these latitudes in the early summer, that is going to be afte...

I thought the most interesting part of the photo is that you see the astronaut's face. Usually the faceplate has some kind of reflection.

I spent a lot of time in the Gulf when I was in the Navy and between the gas flares from the offshore oil rigs and the general haze from blowing sand it's not a great sky viewing area even if you are away from urban lights.

They mentioned the pointers to the polestar, but what about "follow the arc to Arcturus?"

Omega can be seen from some northern places I think even 40 degrees North. It's just spectacular with binos rising above the horizon in a dark place. Right now from my location is almost at the Zenit (75 degrees at 9pm). Unfortunately (for viewing Omega Cen) I live at 61 degrees N, in Alaska. I mis...

Fantastic Image, every star is clearly defined, millions of them! I live in the South Hemisphere so Omega Cen is almost always high in the sky. At naked eye it looks like a blurry star, with common binoculars it's a fantastic object, quite a beautiful sight. I live too far north to see Omega Centau...

Only Thuban comes really close to the precessional circumference. Less than a degree off the pole is plenty close enough to be useful. In the Navy my job was navigation, including celestial navigation. With a few quick computations we could use Polaris to check for gyro compass error, if it was low...

moonstruck wrote:If you look at a straight line from Venus to Mars and keep going, there is a faint something. What might that be? Nice going Luis.

I did a quick check of the Sky and Telescope Interactive Chart and it looks like these planets are all bunched together in Pisces.

I really enjoy pictures like this of CenA that shows its size relative to things we are familiar with. More pictures like this please: M30, Orion, etc. Me too. There was a long exposure picture a while back that showed the real sizes of of the Orion area nebulae and a bunch of other objects above a...

Speaking of miles and kilometers, the text for the photo says the canyon is 3000km long, while the JPL video linked to says the canyon is 3000 miles long (NY to LA). Which is correct, and didn't we lose one of the Martian probes because of English unit/metric unit foul-up?