Starship Asterisk*

Astronomical archeology! This cluster, with stars void of heavy elements, is ancient. Akin to digging up a fossil here on terra firma. So now like any good archeologist, you try to reconstruct the story. This cluster, from the earlier generation of stars -- was it absorbed by the milky way or was it...

That would be Rhodes scholar , not Rodes scolar . The award is named after Cecil John Rhodes . Overheard at a cocktail party-- Fred: What do you do for a living? John: I'm a civil engineer. Fred: Oh so you build stuff? John: Mostly highways and bridges. Fred: Gotta be pretty smart to do that! John:...

the wikipedia graphic for Olbers' paradox gives new meaning to Orange Crush

This guy had it right 1800 years before Copernicus. If people had believed him, we would have been ahead of the game... Makes me wonder what knowledge we're suppressing now that will re-emerge in 1800 years. This guy deserves more than just a crater named after him....maybe A MOON... Ancient gods o...

looking at this image, with its young blue stars nestled amid plumes of cosmic ether, I am reminded of a tibetan mantra: hail to the jewel in the lotus

Hey these folks rival the Danes in optimism -- in Bhutan, they have a Gross National Happiness (GNH) index.

The reporting ethic here in the US has always struck me as a form of socially acceptable insanity. I don't know who is crazier, the talking heads that calmly report the grizzly stories, or the folks that wake up to them early in the morning or tune in right before bed. Anyway, great to hear there is...

Skiers, get your poles ready: Saturn's moon Enceladus appears to be cloaked in drifts of powdery snow around 330 feet (100 meters) thick http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/10/pictures/111004-saturn-moon-powdery-snow-enceladus the moon Enceladus is the best candidate for finding simple org...

from A Boy Named Charlie Brown Lucy : Aren't the clouds beautiful? They look like big balls of cotton. I could just lie here all day and watch them drift by. If you use your imagination, you can see lots of things in the cloud's formations. What do you think you see, Linus? Linus : Well, those cloud...

Moon names, in Native American and other cultures: http://home.hiwaay.net/~krcool/Astro/moon/moonnames.htm Thanks for the list - I was going to ask if anyone knew all the different moon names. They would make for good songs, as each season has its own essence. (Niel Young wrote Harvest Moon, a grea...

Some great fundamental shapes in today's APOD. The cloud, not quite a shape, but an anti-shape, prevalent now in computing. And the bubble, my favorite, whose occurrence is all pervasive, macro and micro. The universe: a bubble, galactic cores: bubbles, gas giants: bubbles (crunchy on the inside) ce...

The sum total of the posts in this discussion is an education in the diversity of human nature more than anything else

Looking at this from just an engineering (My) perspective. If we are dealing with an explosion here, 13.? years ago at the beginning of the explosion the pieces, lets call them Gallaxies, were moving Very Very fast. This is proven from the Red shift. But and this is my Point that was 13.? Billion Y...