Starship Asterisk*

From Stephan Ramsden........"Chris Peterson,with all due respect to your prestigious and well earned academic position, you have "won" APODs in the past and are of course completely satisfied with the system as is." Deep down this is really what bothers Stephan Ramsden. He despis...

Reading Stephen W. Ramsden Facebook page is pure joy. In the comments Chris Go gave proof that the images are from Hubble. Could someone (with Stephen's consent) post this here, for those not on Facebook? Thanks, Jan Here is a link to the post: https://www.facebook.com/stephenramsden/posts/10157301...

There is this thing among some (most?) astrophotographers to try and lay bare the Universe by bringing up the floor of the image a little bit from pure black so that the darkest parts become more easily visible. BTW astrophotographers DO NOT bring up the floor of an image from pure black. The backg...

Perhaps this is beating a dead horse....but this isn't just any image. It was chosen as Astronomy Picture of the Day. The fact a seriously flawed image was chosen gives credibility to critics of APOD that the very best images aren't always chosen. The editors have often shown that they are not in a...

No I'm not rigid on this. I have a lot of experience processing images (probably more than you) so I do know what I'm talking about. You seem compelled to defend the processing for some reason I'm not sure about. I know Martin (although I no longer have his contact info) as a great image processor ...

It's not just the background. The transition of halo to black background is too abrupt and unnatural. We have dozens of computers where I work all with calibrated monitors and the image looks the same for me. So if you think it looks great then I suggest you look into calibrating your monitor or bu...

The image was originally like this and has not been altered by APOD, that is something they never do. For some reason, Martin changed his processing approach last year and all his galaxy images now have really dark backgrounds. I also agree with you as a lot of information for background galaxies i...

Martin is a fine astrophotographer but the image is severely clipped. There's absolutely no shadow data. The background is black which is a major flaw in processing. It's there, it's just not stretched. I'd call it an aesthetic choice rather than a flaw. Well it was a poor (and surprising) processi...

If anyone is interested here's a composite image I made using Roberto's APOD as RGB with detail from HST and Subaru.
http://www.robgendlerastropics.com/M17- ... u-ESO.html

Below is a link to a much higher resolution image of only the HST data. (6000 X 6659 pixels)

http://www.robgendlerastropics.com/M83-New-HST-LL.html

Question: So I downloaded the 348 MB (!) TIFF file and zoomed in. In between the Milky Way foreground stars you can see hundreds of thousands of dots. Are these actually Andromeda's stars or digital noise? Yes those are fully resolved individual stars in M31's disk....117 million of them. It is not...

Unfortunately APOD still has the developement site link I originally gave them which requires a username and password. Hopefully they will make the correction early today. The correct links are below http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2015/02 and ESA http://www.spacetelescope.org/news...

There's a visible / infrared toggle available on Rob's site. It's easy to miss. http://www.robgendlerastropics.com/M31-Spitzer-mouseover.html Disclaimer: I helped make the script so of course I have to persuade people to use it. :) Judy and/or Rob, does the ir data cover the satellite galacy M32 as...

Thanks judy for the script! A couple of comments. Yes M31 does seem to posess a spiral-ring structure in infrared. See the article below. Apparently the ringed nature may be related to previous interactions with its satellite galaxies. http://iopscience.iop.org/1538-4357/638/2/L87/pdf/1538-4357_638_...

Although I'm credited this image is mostly Roberto Colombari's work. I donated my 2006 version of this field which he combined with DSS data. Of course natural luminosity gradients are violated in almost all images of this region.
My 2006 version is below
http://www.robgendlerastropics.com/ODFNM.html

I want to thank Judy Schmidt for her help with today's APOD. She made me aware of the great NOAO local survey data which I used to revise my older version of the same field.

However, I'm not a fan of the fake diffraction spikes. Are you sure they're fake? All the datasets were collected with instruments that produce diffraction spikes, and some brighter stars show spikes on more than one axis. Are you suggesting that the original spikes were edited out and then new one...

Ann wrote:Rogelio Bernal Andreo is the one who first showed the world the now-classic Blue Horsehead in Scorpius.

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap060808.html

...how many "people" I am looking at Ahh, the old Fermi Paradox vs Drake Equation ploy! ........The SETI folks could be trying to communicate with sauropods...... More likely they are trying to communicate with bacteria. For roughly 85% of the history of life on earth......that's all ther...

The colors in this image are somewhat muted, and the blue channel has not been given a boost. Blue is actually quite overexposed in this image. To me, this picture is quite colorful--the opposite of muted. I'm not sure how you could say that it's muted. Strictly from an image processing perspective...

"The colors in this image are somewhat muted, and the blue channel has not been given a boost." Strictly from an image processing perspective the entire image is shift towards red. Even the blue stars are shifted towards purple which confirms my suspicion. This was done I'm sure to maximal...

Speaking of depth of field - have attempts been made to create a view that appears with depth? It would be fascinating to view this photo with depth as with 3D graphics. I would think that with know distances to these objects one might be artificially created. Don’t they create 3D views using two d...

. . . This galaxy is somewhat bland and poor in star formation. Or, to put it somewhat differently, this flying saucer lacks its red nebulae brake lights. Ann -- Just wondering. Do edge-on galaxies show us less nebulae in general, or can we see them fine in most edge-on galaxies? I'm wondering if t...

A little explaining about the image. Because it was assembled from a variety of different data sources there are unavoidable differences in resolution and depth among the various parts of the image. The star stream itself was imaged under superb conditions (three filters, BVR) with the VLT (VIMOS) a...

Sure...anythings possible. I'm not a planetary geologist but maybe someone here knows the answer. If a planet (or moon) lacks suffient means (magnetosphere) to hold on to an atmosphere, it's liquid water would also evaporate quickly. Could an ice covered liquid water ocean exist under these conditi...