Starship Asterisk*

There are no lightning bolts moving between Io and Jupiter. There is a magnetic flux tube, in which currents can flow. Those are very different things. It isn't a question of building up a charge, which then discharges across a gap, but of a steady dynamo effect which generates a steady current. It...

I like this image. It shows a lot. You see the zodiacal light and gegenschein clearly, the dust on the plane of the ecliptic. It shows how the ecliptic goes through the centre of the galaxy, although I don't think it's evidence that the world will explode. I just believe that the spin of the solar s...

It's particularly closeup shots like this that remind me of Turner

I could not open the full-size image because there is a trailing space in front of the file name. When I removed it, I could see Centaurus A in full glory. Yes somebody should edit that. The centre of this galaxy always reminds me of Turner. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/26/...

I believe the main reason the near side of the moon has many fewer impact craters is that it is tidally locked and the Earth makes a great shield. In order to hit this side of the Moon, an asteroid would have to come at the perfect angle past the Earth but not deviate too much. In fact the video see...

This is one of my pet peeves about science fiction movies. Every time I watch one of those movies, I want to SCREAM at the silver screen, "YOU IDIOTS! YOU CAN'T HEAR SOUNDS IN OUTER SPACE!" WHY can't they do this right? Yeah! And there aren't orchestras out in space either. It would be un...

I'm the Valentine Scrooge. If people loved each other they would show it all year and not have to be forced by endless advertising razzmatazz to buy overpriced roses once a year. Such a love will wilt and die like the flowers.

Sandstone wrote:A cosmic rose for Valentine's Day... how appropriate!

Horrible. Do they celebrate Christmas or Ramadan, or just the worship of money?

Boomer12k wrote:Magnificent picture!
Ok, here is one for you...just right of center is a big bunch of lines, above the north end of the canyon. Why does it look like a stick figure of a man plowing in a field?
Either that or it looks like a Chinese letter...

As long as it doesn't look like a french letter

What an absolutely stunning photo. Congratulations to this spaceship's mission and all involved with her success to date. Seriously, how much more mind-blowing science has been revealed to mankind by this single probe, than arguably all findings associated with the ISS thus far?!? Cost wise, these ...

I believe the reason we don't really see green in a sunset is that the spectrum is too blurred. If you spread it out further, you might see more in-between colours. Maybe if our eyes could see near infrared, we might not see so much red either (our cellphones can see near IR, which isn't usually a g...

This is a wonderful picture, but it is too cropped. It would be more artistically and æsthetically pleasing if there were significant space around it.

I imagine travelling towards it and landing at a moon base on its surface...

Colour is a funny thing. Painters know of a thing called "atmospheric perpective", where the distant objects appear bluer when filtered through the atmosphere. For distant green hills, you need to add a lot of blue. Even stars high in the sky would have some amount of this... What intrigue...

Don't worry. Town planners and architects in the northern hemisphere always got that wrong. There are stately homes in New Zealand where the homeowners' rooms faced South and are therefore cold, whereas the servants' areas faced the Sun to the North...

More about the antipodes...
http://skyvington.blogspot.co.nz/2007/0 ... world.html
I'm not sure about the bit about buffoons resigning, though. That's a little bit hopeful.

Judging from how the crescent Moon at far right is illuminated in this image (it is illuminated on its left side), the image seems to be taken in the morning, and the dark blue Earth shadow is sinking as the Sun is rising. Hahaa! You're wrong! Argentina is in the southern hemisphere where everythin...

Am I wrong in thinking that elemental hydrogen is still the most common constituent of nebulae? Absolutely. The total mass of even the dustiest nebula is overwhelmingly from atomic and molecular hydrogen, followed by helium. The mass of all that dust doesn't amount to more than one or two percent o...

This isn't a false-color image. It's straight LRGB, meaning the hues approximately match human vision. As always with objects too dim to stimulate color vision, the choice of how saturated to show the colors is entirely arbitrary. No RGB image, from nearly B&W to gaudy color, is more or less &q...

The Great Nebula in Orion is truly an amazing sight. It's even prominent with the naked eye, so I always wonder why it's only the 42nd Messier object. M1 the Crab Nebula is much duller and harder to find. I wonder why he missed it. I'm sorry I don't like the colours. I don't really like false-colour...

Of course you're also looking through a lot of atmosphere at the horizon. The Sun also appears red. Yeah, but these colors are produced by narrow emission lines. No amount of atmosphere can make a narrow green line look red- all it can to is reduce the brightness. It probably did that, then, meanin...

Imagine the night sky in a couple of hundred years. Such a timelapse video would look like a web of white lines of satellite paths.
There might even be space stations big enough to see clearly with your naked eye.

The video has a lot of satellites whizzing past. There might have also been one or two meteors.
We have a lot of space traffic up there, don't we? No wonder space junk is a concern.

Of course you're also looking through a lot of atmosphere at the horizon. The Sun also appears red.

Ions are electrically charged, so they are influenced by other charged particles in the solar wind, so these tails point away from the Sun. The dust tail is just left behind by the comet, boiled off or something by the proximity to the Sun, so it's left in the comet's path and shows where it's been....

It's interesting to see the different shapes of these nebulae. You could learn something about the structure of the star that died. We can look at the disc of Betelgeuse, for example and see bright patches and hazard a guess about what shape the nebula will be when it blows.