Starship Asterisk*

Sorry Chris, someone else was the rude person, it wasn't you looking back, what you said wasn't rude at all, and yes you did offer scientific reason. I don't personally know much at all about volcanism, I just think "B"s reasoning that different density gases/liquids(?) flowing next to eac...

I find it a little close-minded to immediately dismiss the possibilty of a volcano-analogous process to be occurring on the "surface" of a planet to which we've never been. I'm not refuting "evidence" against it or links to other possible causes, but the nature of the scientific ...

This is a beautiful image, and it doesn't look photoshopped at all, I have no idea what that guy was complaining about. You can actually see two additional stars, lower left AND lower right, but I have no idea which one it is, I'll refer that question to someone else. Also, thank you Neufer for remi...

Chris P: I admire most of your postings--but I took slight umbrage of your mis-spelling of Arecibo. Today, there is a plethora of useless discussion on apostrophes. This is not place for such trash. I apologize for my faux pas. Mr. Chris P quoted someone else who misspelled Arecibo. It would be inc...

Many small radio telescopes using interferometry methods on the lunar far-side (rather than the poles) may be more useful for observations, and much more cost effective to get there than something like the VLT. Frequencies that we haven't been able to "silently" observe from the noisy eart...

I've always dreamed of going here some day... this picture almost makes the waiting painful though...

Thanks to neufer for sharing the youtube link! I've always loved the original, didn't know there was a "boy" version as well. Guess I've learned my new thing for the day.

I got Tennessee early in the game and put it too far west. Oooo, don't you hate that? I just played again, and got 98%, average error 1 mile, 268 seconds. It helped that my first four states were Michigan, Florida, Maryland, and West Virginia. First try, 98%, avg error 3 miles, in 203 seconds. 8-) ...

I like the graphic, I'm actually amazed you found something illustrating that. An earlier post called into question Kepler's intensity resolution, and pointed out that it's capable of detecting an earth-sized planet's dimming against a star, is this comparable to the eclipsed red dwarf? On the brown...

Seems odd to refer to it as the "farside" rather than the "darkside" of the moon a la Pink Floyd's 1972 masterpiece. Darkside refers to the half of the moon that is not illuminated by the sun, not to the farside. In other words, the dark side of the moon is simply the side oppos...

Perhaps somebody can help... The graphic portrays the smallest stars on the bottom-right to be smaller in diameter than the largest planet orbiting the largest star in the top-left. This seems to contradict the idea that any planet with a mass larger than Jupiter would not show an increase in size,...