Starship Asterisk*

Judy Schmidt wrote: This system is curiously bright at certain infrared bands, and I'm not entirely sure why. I'd love to see what JWST makes of this thing. Being such a well-studied object, I would guess that it will eventually become a Webb target. Thanks Ann, bystander, and Geck for the info! It...

Telesto and Calypso are big enough that they're perturbing Tethys as well. Saturn's mass is ~6 orders of magnitude greater than that of Tethys. Tethys's mass is ~5 orders of magnitude greater than that of Telesto or Calypso. Okay, so you're suggesting insignificant to the orbital mechanics of Tethy...

Animation of Polydeuces/Dione/Helene orbits relative to Saturn https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7f/Animation_of_Polydeuces%27s_orbit_relative_to_Saturn_and_Dione.gif Telesto (24 kilometers, or 15 miles across) shares the orbit of Saturn's moon Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or 665 miles ...

Youtube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoMRwyNhqJ4 It is really tremendous for us astronomers to have a really close-up look at an actual planet! Complex and interesting! Thanks neufer! Yes, an image of this event is certainly worthy of at least one APOD. I see it does respond nicely to heeh...

A lovely image, and it allows me to focus attention on the shapes of the clouds.
Congratulations, Matt. And I like that signature line:

Cameras, Binoculars, Dobs, Cats, and Refractors. Whatever it takes!

Wow, I love this time lapse!

It really shows that the ion tail boils off and is blown away.

Something I never really pictured that clearly before.

Hey cool! Let's point the JWST to get a shot of Venus at inferior conjunction! (sarcasm emoji) Better shoot quick, though, before the boiling clouds of helium obscure the view! Interesting. I had not read about this! On the Webb, the MIRI instrument is cooled by a special "cryocooler". Ex...

Hey cool! Let's point the JWST to get a shot of Venus at inferior conjunction! (sarcasm emoji)

Also, johnnydeep, welcome to the 1000-post club!

Thanks johnnydeep, neufer, and Chris for the links and discussion that help me understand the choice of L2. So, it seems that there were a few possible reasons to prefer L2, but this discussion centers on the difficulty of communicating large amounts of data from 1 AU away, as the biggest downside t...

LagrangePointsSunEarth.jpg I had trouble figuring out why L2 was chosen instead of another one of the 5 Lagrange points. Clearly L3 would be terrible -- huge distance, never a clean line of communication. And L1 would not be a good choice for this mission (though it is handy for the SOHO mission). ...

What a beautiful image! I am trying to understand what I'm seeing and can learn about Jupiter from this image. Let me know if I got any of the following incorrect: Those comparatively small white clouds above the larger oval are condensed water clouds, much like on Earth. And they're floating in a t...

I was thrilled when I saw this image during the launch coverage. A few seconds before this view, it was out of focus and glitching in the 2nd stage camera image. A few seconds later, it was overexposed and looked like a fuzzy blob of light as the 2nd stage maneuvered to avoid hitting it and then it ...

Looks like the fireball stole the Comet Leonard's Thunder! :shock: The Giant Arc stole the fireball's Thunder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXtmRRXTiSw <<The Giant Arc is a large-scale structure discovered in June 2021 that spans 3.3 billion light years. The structure of galaxies exceeds the 1.2...

A question pops up for me. In ancient times the year was considered to start on the vernal equinox when the Sun was in Pisces. Therefore it is said we are in the Age of Pisces and coming up is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius when the Sun moves over into that sign. However, in these modern times ...

As for the ISS, I think I have seen it twice, but I noticed that it moved, it was very bright, and then quite quickly it got fainter and disappeared. . . . Ann I have enjoyed this: https://spotthestation.nasa.gov/ I wondered if this was only available in the United States, but when I put in "M...

(Mad, Mad, mad ...) I was wondering if you might pick up on my made-up word "firescape". You (and Spencer Tracy) did not disappoint. That movie had about every living comedian (at the time) in its cast, even Buster Keaton! It didn't age well, the humor seems just silly now (time is rough ...

alter-ego wrote: ↑Fri Nov 12, 2021 4:29 am Today's image kinda looks like an aerial or satellite nighttime view of the California wildfires.

Wow, it does indeed look like a firescape.

A current problem in plasma physics is that observed reconnection happens much faster than predicted by MHD in high Lundquist number plasmas (i.e. fast magnetic reconnection). Solar flares, for example, proceed 13–14 orders of magnitude faster than a naive calculation would suggest, and several ord...

Good point about the "dreary days", Mark. November, December, January, February and sometimes March are often overcast, gray and dreary where I live. And when it clears up it gets cold, which I am also unhappy about. Ann Well, here's wishing you more days of sunshine this winter ... and a...

By the way, for today's APOD . . . I find the image lovely and creative in its design. Nevertheless, I quickly found myself wishing to have just seen the 180-degree image un-warped, and felt it would probably be considerably more beautiful to have just seen it as nature actually presented itself.

I was born far north in Sweden, just a little bit south of the Arctic Circle, Is that where you also grew up? If so, did you find the almost sun-less winter days difficult to cope with? I was born in Luleå, but we moved to Malmö when I was nine. So we moved some 1,500 kilometers away, mostly to the...

Kitty stuck in between two pillows! :shock: Great picture, Orin. Nice example of horizontal compression. :-) I vote that it go farther to the left (I know my vote won't get counted). I'm intrigued by that feature that looks like a sand cornice way over at the left of the image. It's a 360° panorama...

Great sequence of beautiful shots. 3 questions come to mind: Does this show the greatest angle at which we ever see the rings (from Earth)? I've never seen them tilted further than the end images shown, but I've not been observing Saturn for very long. It looks like the images toward the middle some...

orin stepanek wrote: ↑Tue Sep 14, 2021 1:26 pm Kitty stuck in between two pillows!

Great picture, Orin. Nice example of horizontal compression.

I vote that it go farther to the left (I know my vote won't get counted). I'm intrigued by that feature that looks like a sand cornice way over at the left of the image.