Starship Asterisk*

I thought Vesta is the largest asteroid and Ceres is a dwarf planet??? Well, the term "asteroid" was used to indicate that these objects were "starlike", that is, too small and distant to be resolved telescopically. Now that other investigative techniques are available (ahem), t...

I bet you an ice cold one that if you fly over the Earth with a space station, without the vertical exageration, you would not find Mt Everest. The discovery of Mount Everest illustrates your point. Its height was found as part of a general survey using the most exacting technology available. It wa...

We are still going to space. We have an active program of both manned and unmanned space exploration. We retired a piece of overpriced, obsolete, dangerous technology. So what? It hasn't changed anything in actual practice, except possibly to free up some resources for more useful purposes. The onl...

. . . it could be titled "This is America!" Don't you mean "This WAS America"? I've noted this disconnection to reality generally in ceremonial comment on the retirement of the Space Shuttle. Somehow the pride in past glory becomes a permanent reality. This delusion is most evid...

Ann wrote:... as if going to space was no big deal.
Ann

I guess it isn't, since we're not doing it anymore.

... not bitter ... much!

I think you're taking it a little too far, now. I'm going to lean on good old Occam and his nifty little razor and say the photographer is responsible for the entire content of the photos and it isn't as complicated as you are making it out. It's several photos stitched together to create a vertica...

Gonna say this is a battle not worth picking. It's meant to be artistic, not scientific. It's not a battle, it's a question. What did he do? How far did he go? I mean once you start cutting and pasting, where do you stop? Where is that water tower? Did he pick it up from an image archive? Would tha...

After following up on my "ground track", I'm back to big problems with this image. That is, I don't think it is scientifically coherent. I identified the houses in the foreground and found that a line of sight towards the moon gave a bearing of 120 degrees, using the Google Earth line draw...

OK, hold everything! I've located the "ground track" in Google Earth, and I'm up to Warren Lake. It's direction checks out with the ESE bearing of the rising moon at that date and location. My estimate of the distance to that water tower may turn out to be pretty close. I guess what was re...

Everything in the picture is calibrated by the angular size of the moon. For example, the water tower on the horizon is about 1/14 the diameter of the moon, in the image. This means it subtends about .01/14 radians, and this is the ratio of its height to its distance from the camera. A 100 ft height...

Some strange processing on this makes the moon look incredibly saturated. It's kind of like looking at famous faces on magazine covers who have received Photoshop makeovers... something isn't quite right but you can't be sure what it is. There are a lot of things wrong with this picture. On the pho...