Starship Asterisk*

The lower nebula (the soul) looks like a cartoon animal, maybe a fox. It even has eyes made up of stars.

I know this photo was taken in clear skies, and the moon was well above the horizon, but wouldn't there be more reddening of the moon closer to the horizon than is visible in the photo?

Isn't there a theory that old stars in clusters merged, thus making them look younger?

Any word on what the whitish patches are (there is one in the lower-right corner)?

Redbone wrote:I wonder how the asymmetric thrust is balanced?

It looks like the rocket nozzle is turned to the side a bit to balance the rocket. In other words, the computer is auto-balancing the rocket, so the nozzle was temporarily swiveled. A video of the launch would prove or disprove my idea.

Scientists say that the moon stabilizes the rotation of the Earth, but what would Earth's rotation be like if the Moon was in a polar orbit? It seems very convenient and unlikely that the moon would have, after a planet crashed into Earth, ended up in an orbit so aligned with the ecliptic. And will...

Scientists say that the moon stabilizes the rotation of the Earth, but what would Earth's rotation be like if the Moon was in a polar orbit? It seems very convenient and unlikely that the moon would have, after a planet crashed into Earth, ended up in an orbit so aligned with the ecliptic. And will ...

It looks like the ecliptic is around 60 degrees off the plane of the Milky Way. How unusual is that, knowing what we do about other 'solar' systems?

Clicking on "jovian giant" takes you to "404 The cosmic object you are looking for has disappeared beyond the event horizon."
And why is "jovian" not capitalized? It should be... Or am I missing something?

Because some of Pluto's surface is visible in the thin crescent at the top, the geometry of this image did not have the sun directly behind Pluto, but somewhere obliquely off frame to the upper right? I know there was photography taken when Pluto occulted the sun, but they must have taken a series ...

Soooo, what causes the shadow in the largest crater? It's something about six feet tall, on the left rim of the crater. Probably just a rock. Something more mysterious to me, are the smoothed-out craters. It looks like several yards of dust landed on them, but based on what the Apollo astronauts fou...

It's puzzling to me that the camera on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has lines on its digital sensor (CCD?) registering differing brightnesses. My digital camera from 10 years ago had a more even light registration.

I notice that no one here has mentioned that the halo is hexagon shaped. How could that have happened?

This sentence can be interpreted two ways: "Separated detectors can be used to discern gravitational waves from everyday bumps." I don't think I create gravity waves when I hit my head on something, though yesterday while helping a friend build his house, I did hit my head hard enough to s...

According to geckzilla, "...this image is indeed the same ISS copy and pasted over and over and not a stack of video frames. Even the ISS on top of Saturn is the same." I can say that the instances of the ISS outside of Saturn are identical, down to the pixel, so they are clones of each ot...

As an honest photographer, I get upset when people fake photos to get attention or sell more prints. I have some very good photos (I have been told anyway), but have sold very few. I am not trying much, admittedly. Here is an astronomy-related photo that I have taken. http://www.fineartamerica.com/f...

AND, I just overlaid one of the instances of the ISS in the photo onto several other ones with the opacity at about 50% to compare the differences (since they looked suspiciously identical), and indeed, all the instances I compared are identical. That could not happen in reality.

I'm thinking this photo might not be what it says it is. I noticed that the spacing of the ISS near Saturn seems smaller. Using a ruler on my computer screen, I measured a spacing of about 1.5 inches between most frame grabs, but only about 1.2 inches to the upper-left of Saturn, and about 1.1 inche...

Here is my idea (if Blue Origin or SpaceX would send me a 1% royalty, I would be happy). Eliminate the landing legs, and land it on a computer-controlled movable metal grate. The computer would move the grate to balance the rocket like a person balances a vertical pole. Then computer-controlled arms...

How long did it take for Venus go from 100% brightness to 0% brightness as it occulted? If it were a star, I imagine it would be practically instant, but Venus does have some angular size to it.

My first thought when I saw the photo was, "That's no comet!"
I suppose the reason the comet's tail points (apparently) in almost opposite directions is perspective. So they are probably both pointing toward Earth, with only a few degrees separating them.

Ummmm.....me thinks a good way to understand the depressions on Phobos is to read up on Rilles of The Moon....which are mostly sunken Lava tubes or areas that collapsed. But that does not necessarily explain the "straightness" and "one direction-ness" of these grooves....however...

It seems clear to me that the grooves were created by a string of rocks crashing into Phobos. If so, I would guess there was an earlier moon that broke up into a ring that Phobos crashed through a few times.

Looking att the two pictures, one after another, I seem to detect faint reddish "spokes", somewhat similar to those seen on Saturn's rings. They are vertical, and there are about five of them. The reason I spotted them is that they move a little bit between the two pictures. What could th...

This reminds me of hurricane Patricia currently in the east Pacific that strengthened to it's current incredible strength of 185 mph from 75 mph in just 24 hours.