Starship Asterisk*

Is there a teapot in the trunk? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot
It'd be nice to finally get this Russell conundrum out of the way.

Practically a Yin-Yang.
The lack of fine structure is remarkable, and exactly what you'd expect for non-collisional particles.

Looks like there's some serious energy there.
3 light years seems a little too close.
I think I'd rather stand within 3 feet of a mile long coal train doing 60mph.

The 2 holes switch places on the order of every (66 x π/2) km /(300,000 km/s) ~ 1/3,000 seconds corresponding to ~ 3,000 Hz which should correspond to the highest possible gravitational wave frequency. So we're hearing years (orbits) go by. Doesn't seem to be much distortion of the spherical holes ...

That chirp hits a mighty high frequency for two objects that are kilometers in diameter.

Is that the moon at the top right of the placeholder image?

Nice shot. Tafreshi must have a big lens and a high megapixel camera to keep the moon overexposure from making a big nasty blob.

Higher resolution please.
At 40 meters per pixel it's just not possible to tell if those lines that look like fissures are fissures.
About 0.5 meter per pixel should do the job.
Of course that's months, or more likely, years away, if ever.

Nice Shot!
This'll make a nice replacement for Ursa Major on my 2' display.

So are the red far and the blue close, vice versa, or some mixture of the two?

Convection cells, with less dense material concentrated at the edges?
Is Sputnik mostly water or mostly CO?
Heat of fusion for CO is about a tenth that of water.

wsx wrote:LOL, "iconic heart"...

If we renamed Pluto "the planetoid of love", it might cool some of the more ardent claims that Pluto is a planet. We'd just have to believe that the spot really does look like a heart.

I was expecting something more Vesta-like. That atmosphere has clearly been messing with Pluto's surface features. It's probably time to start planning an orbiter mission. That should prove quite a challenge with Charon messing up the gravity field as it does, and all those other little moonlets to ...

That's a very nice example of a shot best taken with a remote camera.
I'd not like to be standing there in the open when the rocket took off.

Looks like it left the front of the sun in late middle age, before all the little spotlets start to disappear. Did 2339 make it around for a renumbered, second trip across the front face? Beautiful animation. APOD would do well to post a few more like this, as they don't all evolve the same way. Wie...

radio the staff at the Temple of Poseidon to turn their search lights on again! A few green lasers would make a nice addition. If you're going to go wild with lighting like this, you might as well take it past the limit of movie theatres and office towers. I think it's kind of nice. Light pollution...

That is very disturbing.
Landscapes are not supposed to look like that.

Jan. 22, 2014: Scientists using the Herschel space observatory have made the first definitive detection of water vapor on the largest and roundest object in the asteroid belt, dwarf planet Ceres. http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/22jan_ceres/ January 20, 2015 ... First Hubbl...

Is it just the phase that makes it look so oblate?
Hubble image doesn't look that squashed: http://phys.org/news/2011-07-minor-plan ... earth.html

Wow!
I wonder if the Hale telescope could have matched this back in the day, had it been in the proper hemisphere.
Pretty good imagery for any telescope, far less a 32 incher.

Despite a density of 0.4 g/cc, less than half that of water, (http://sci.esa.int/rosetta/14615-comet-67p/), I'm still not seeing a whole lot of porosity in the structure.
Ice foam cliffs, low density clathrates?

enhanced in this sharp image from a small telescope

Small as in a 150 mm refractor, or as in a 20" Cassegrain?
I don't see that info at the Hallas' website.
Regardless, nice shot! Someone has dark skies.

mtbdudex wrote:I may be in my 50's but thought this looked familiar....and posted just 3 years ago, that's kinda short turnaround for repeating, no?

Do a search on "speeding". APOD'S been CMB Dipole: Speeding Through the Universe ten times, and worth it every time.

Internet Classic!

Just look at how fractured that rock is! I wouldn't want to try climbing it at anything close to 1 gravity. Wonder if pressure of melting volatiles is what caused the cracking, or just collision/thermal expansion. Given what looks to be regular rock surface here, the smooth regions elsewhere have go...