Starship Asterisk*

The rolling-eyes emoticon is pretty nasty itself if used in certain ways, such as this one. There is an art to criticizing without sounding critical. Chill out man, there's nothing nasty I said. But you've got a criticism every time you see that emoticon. Emoticons are meant to clarify the tone of ...

So the figure of 12.7 million is a bit off, but close enough for horseshoes . From that, it would appear DavidLeodis was more correct than BDanielMayfield. But when I read STScI-2004-07 I noticed where BDanielMayfield must have seen his info: Called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF), the million-s...

It reminds me of the no-longer-calling-Pluto-a-planet issue. Illogical. :roll: The only thing illogical about it is to get emotional over the subject. Who's getting emotional? Not me. But it did create a lot of emotional controversy for a long time. And no, there were a whole load of illogical aspe...

Wow, Comet Lovejoy is surreal in this image! At first I thought it was a painting! :lol2: I've only seen it in light polluted skies, as a B & W coma-only. Perhaps I'll take my new giant binos out to dark skies... it's just that it's so darn frigid though, in the early morning. I find this chart ...

I once built a super-simple model of the inner solar system. I used cotton balls, 0.02 meters in diameter, for the Earth, Venus and Mars. I used yellow peas for Mercury and the Moon, and a round table-cloth, 2 meters in diameter, for the Sun. I then placed the "planets" at the appropriate...

It's good to see that there are still places in Europe dark enough to take images of this degree of detail of the galaxy. What an extraordinary object! And what an extraordinary view to choose, when most other aspects do not make the pinnacle look so, how can I put this, male? I suppose that this wa...

It says there's no modern spiral galaxies this far back in the universe, but I believe I do see some spiral structure in certain ones. For example, the one on the left edge at 38 sec. into the video. Whoah, looking at these ultra/extreme deep fields produces an profound feeling of wonder that is har...

With this particular image, definitely Cotton Candy Nebula was the only thing that came to mind.

... By the way, I don't believe it. There doesn't appear to be enough matter there to even "paint" the oceans back in place. Luckily, science doesn't require belief. All you have to do is gather up some commonly available facts and perform the calculations yourself. Rob That's a good resp...

I've had the APOD set as my homepage for about 4 years. I've always read the text too in order to know something about the picture. It's an awesome window into the universe!