Starship Asterisk*

Boomer12k wrote:On the left side of the mountain...you can see climbing prints....one determined dude...

Perfect slope there, but I see no sign of the toboggan for the return ride.

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter caught the comet too: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mro/news/whats ... ewsID=1739

This is really quite a lovely photograph.
The uncorrected overexposure of Mars emphasizes the planet's color beautifully, and makes a great contrast with 51 Ophiuchi's blue.
The comet image is among the best I've seen.
Nice work!

Beautifully composed!

geckzilla wrote:What has happened here is either the intentional or accidental misalignment of the blue channel. Red is ok. I think green is slightly misaligned but it's not obvious. And then blue is off by several pixels.

That nicely explains those swaths of blue where there should be something closer to white.

So blue is the new white.

For example: what or why is that ring, roughly 1/2 of the picture in diameter, slightly to the left of picture center? Why is that ring depicted there? Why is there a change in color hue beyond that ring? Might be that the 100 source images are slightly biased towards large, face on spirals and pla...

That's one of the best spectre shots I've ever seen, far more impressive than the usual airplane glory.
Optical conditions must have been ideal.

I wonder what the mass of this thing is. Have new mass estimates been released yet? No. Last I saw was in the 0.1 to 0.4 g per cubic cm range. Too insubstantial for even CO2 or nitrogen ice. Yet the thing is obviously rigid. Now that Rosetta's in orbit, it shouldn't be too long before a proper grav...

Center of mass is in the neck, between larger body and smaller head: http://rosetta.jpl.nasa.gov/news/surface_impressions_rosetta%E2%80%99s_comet Overall density of the comet is reportedly between 0.1 and 0.5 g per cubic cm, depending on how calcs are done. See Wikipedia for one value, there are sev...

NGC3314 wrote:They may have been arbitrarily recentered for display at a central position.

Could be. There's no stars visible to verify the background, so we'll have to wait a few weeks for better imagery.

Center of rotation/mass is within or near the neck. The smaller lobe must mass near as much as the larger, so composition must be different.
Iron/nickel vs rock+ice or mostly rock vs mostly ice?
From uniform albedo, everything looks to be covered with coat of dust.

Ann wrote:Do read Scott Rosen's own description of how he made his image!

So the Squid IS an emission nebula:

the Squid Nebula shines by the blue/green light of OIII - the forbidden line of doubly ionized Oxygen.

Nebula, the image, is 6 light years across. A star 6 light years across would be massive enough to already be a black hole, which would make it much smaller and harder to see. The gas consists of the remains of thousands of coronal mass ejections like these from the sun: http://www.youtube.com/watch...

Lovely! Made me check on exoplanets in Globular Clusters. Still none found. In open clusters, yes: http://www.universetoday.com/108127/thr ... r-cluster/
But still nothing from which to view globulars close up.

It's a Psychedelic Freakout!
Does it also come in eyestunningly oversaturated shades of green and purple?

I don't think the cameras are behind glass. They are gaffa-taped to a metal balcony railing. Following the "The well-planned daily exposures began" link, led me to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGm-_mPD4Ko Lovely! If I were to leave a pipe pinehole camera like that taped to my balcony f...

A CCD is vastly superior to film in every respect I remember learning to push Tri-X pan to ISO 2000, so I could take non-flash images at swim-meets and concerts. The results were always grainy. Nowdays getting such flashless shots in low light is trivial with camera ISO numbers easily going past 80...

Compares favorably to the 60's vintage photo of the Rosette nebula taken with Palomar's 48-inch Schmidt telescope: http://palomarskies.blogspot.com/2010/0 ... ebula.html

This is from the 16 incher? Wow!
http://www.astrodonimaging.com/observatories/

Typical low earth orbit is 90 minutes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Earth_orbit#Examples , and unless that rocket is travelling east to west, Thailand is two thirds of an orbit away. Sixty minutes is too long for Ariane's primary burn, so perhaps what we are seeing is gas from a secondary burn m...