Starship Asterisk*

Thanks to Case, Chris, iamlucky13 and neufer for taking the time to answer this. I understand about angle/field of view. I think the issue must be that I was assuming (wrongly, it seems) that APOD editors crop photos in order to show certain features and eliminate other irrelevant ones. If what we s...

Thanks, neufer. But since the angular dimension is nowhere specified, it seems that the phrase "at the estimated distance" adds no information to the sentence. Might as well say "this object is distant from earth." This is not an earth-shaking matter, but every time I read this i...

My first post: not really an astronomy question, but a language question about something frequently given in APOD. As in 11/11/11, "The close-up field of view spans over 25,000 light-years at the estimated distance of M83". This carries the implication that the expanse shown is dependent o...