Starship Asterisk*

The best is probably the one you will use the most. This is likely to be the one you can use in your own yard. Assuming you live in a light polluted area, the moon and planets are bright enough to be almost completely unaffected by light pollution. A small SCT (Schmidt Cassegrain Telescope) of apert...

The APOD has a rather wide field compared with typical planetary detail images from Earth. Chris is correct re the scale and apparent size of Mars.

(Edit ... Shoulda read the full thread. I've added nothing.)

It is amazing what you can see once you know it is there.

It occurs to me now, that pretty much all flags bearing stars from our sky, will have the stars appearing mirrored on their reverse sides.

But the Brazilian flag is one of those rare flags that is identical on both sides, so the stars are mirrored on both sides.

Please explain to me why this (bad) image was chosen, even though it shows an inverted and false look at this beautiful region! One can argue about the processing, but modified image orientations are a curse! I also don't like mirror images as much, but they are more often unmodified image orientat...

Yes, it is north up, east right. Flip!

I am sure Clark felt it was better to be civilised than to be barbarous. He was clearly a big fan of civilisation(s). But I am not sure the term "barbarian" was always used in a pejorative sense through history. My understanding is that the term was used to classify "foreign" peo...

Clark seems to discriminate between the civilised and the barbarian, based on whether or not they wrote and/or maintained books. And that is a very problematic way to describe humanity. But the series is not so broad as to cover "humanity". The series is on western European civilisation; ...

Okay, I can now see the link between the success of complex life and the success of Western civilisation, since both successes were, supposedly, "by the skin of our teeth". This particular link only became clear to me when you pointed it out explicitly. Other links could easily be made bet...

yeah, and we're always noble conquerors bringing "civilization" to others, who are savages and barbarians. right. In the first episode of Clark's Civilisation , it was described more as small pockets of civilisation, surviving the barbarians (mainly Germanic and Norse people) over a perio...

If you view the Civilisation series for what it is, in context, created 50 years ago, and presented with enthusiasm by an aristocratic aesthete, already renowned for popularising the arts, and nearing the end of his career, you might cut the old guy some slack. (Clark that is, not neufer. I feel tha...

We're just another flawed species, so perhaps our crappy civilisations are the best we can aspire to until a more intelligent species takes our place.

I imagine that Kenneth Clark might have gracefully accepted some of your criticism, geck, but only to a degree. The rather famous BBC TV series "Civilisation" was only intended to cover European/Western civilisation, from the dark ages to early 20th century, and attracted much more praise ...

I cede to your superior knowledge.

Does anyone mention the EMF waves being caused by military for weather manipulation? The aurora activity has always been thought to be caused by the sun. When the sun is quiet this has left the "scientists" puzzled to come up with other nonsense from their basket of explanations. The weat...

So long, so wide, so deep, so narrow. Magnificent.

I don't think this image was recorded in early April. M33 was too close to the Sun at that time. Perhaps a month or more earlier.

Just filling in some gaps ...

30,000 km/s ~ maximal supernova expulsion speed
3,000 km/s ~ redshift speed of Centaurus Cluster of galaxies
3 km/s ~ speed for geostationary orbit of Earth

Does this 'object' have an NGC designation ? I guess not. Wikipedia wrote about the Southern Crab Nebula: Designations: V852 Cen, Hen 2-104, IRAS 14085-5112, PN G315.4+09.4, Wray 16-147, 2MASS J14115206-5126241 Apparent magnitude (V): 14.20 The Southern Crab Nebula is a 14th magnitude object. I don...

JohnD wrote: ↑Mon Apr 22, 2019 9:28 am
I'd criticise the video for showing nothing about the geography under the colour contours. What structres are assocaiated with the methan plumes?

John

Here is another image originally published with the video:

There was another pass on the 28th, 90 minutes earlier. It was 7 minutes from horizon to shadow.

I just saw this youtube video . Because I am as dense as I am, and because it always takes a long time for me to digest new things, I can't say that I understood it to the point that I could repeat it and explain it myself. But I think that one of the points made in the video was that Doppler blues...

This is interesting. If it wasn't for the 'us' the names Kentaurus and Centauri almost rhymes. It would even be closer if you pronounced the C as a hard C like in the words cat, candle or Canada. I've always pronounced Centauri with a soft C as in cent, city, or celebrity. Which makes me wonder, ho...

That's the day before. I checked the 28th.

With M87 being 12 degrees north of the celestial equator, I am not sure how the South Pole Telescope might have helped in this image. Certainly useful for Sgr A*, however, the data from which, I assume, is currently being analysed. I am now wondering how a resolution of 20 micro arc seconds was ach...