Starship Asterisk*

. . . Regardless of what documents the "charitable" 1% have signed, the effort in space should suffer no egotistical fools. The car is being portrayed as a playful, astonishing and admirable feat by a young etrepreneur making his high-profile mark in his chosen field. Advertising efforts ...

I love following Elon and his exploits. I think he is an inspiration and has good motives. If this forum is expressing a crude voting process as to whether or not something like this is a good APOD, I am all for it. It was a very well-planned and beautifully executed example of astrophotography, an...

Please, no more SpaceX stunts on APOD. Musk's SpaceX is business, not science, orientated. Keep this site's postings to its name sake, astronomy. Yes, no more APOD support of rank commercialism in space. Logos on asteroid-mining vehicles are OK, etc. But Musk is going to feature a screenshot of the...

I usually check in to thank the photographer/image processor for the work they've done and for their generosity. Today, though, is a stratight up selection and explanation by Drs. Nemiroff and Bonnell that evokes, for me the wonder of our universe and the technology that allows me to see it here at...

As a regular guy who's addicted to APOD, if the blurb sez there's a bar there, I figure the spectrum that the photo was taken in just doesn't feature it, and the blurb is pointing out other aspects of the galaxy. Since Andromeda has such 'low surface brightness' so as to keep it small in our sky at ...

There are a lot of photos of Mars, from orbiters and rovers, that look remarkably like Earth desert terrain. And then along come photos like today's and a few others like this : https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120422.html , that would be completely appropriate for a "Rocketship XM" movie-styl...

So.... can we "surf" to Alpha Centauri on one? Math homework problem: how close does a black hole merger have to be, to create a wave strong enough that a space ship from Earth can ride it to the next star? As the wave is directional, how much steering is possible? How do we get off the w...

Waiting for a scene in a scifi movie where someone with expanded-spectrum vision looks at the night sky and sees for the first time, without instruments, how crowded with magnificence it really is.

How far from our Sun would a spacecraft have to travel, before the constellations began to change ? What would be the first ones to distort ?

In an old NOVA documentary on chaos theory some mathematics profs at a Texas university set up a rotating tank of fluid, then introduced colored dyes, while a rotating movie camera above observed the results. A stable but slowly orbiting "Great Red Spot" spontaneously organized itself, and...

With all the discussion here of -apparent- features, I as a layman, had a question. From Rosetta photos of the bleak landscape of this object, that it took just prior to its touchdown, it -looked- like there were scree slopes below cliffs. Is there enough gravity on this comet for rocks to fall off ...

You may as well bundle the whole crust beyond the depth man has ever ventured and roll it into a ball,

I think gravity did that already, about 4 billion years ago. It's what the water's sitting on.

MRO found Beagle II in a much bigger haystack. It is amazing what the flight dynamics people can come up with, even in the relatively tiny gravity field of a comet.

In the NOVA episode called "The Edge Of Space", Sprite research is featured. A group of scientists, split between two small jet planes, and equipped with ultra-high speed cameras, flew near a very powerful thunderstorm over Colorado, and captured a whole zoo of TLE types, including one in ...

Spiral structure in galaxies- from what does it arise? Intuitively, it seems to come from spinning, but that can't be right, based on all the other flavors of galactic structure. I've read (or heard) that spiral structure is massaged into the galactic disc by gravity waves propagating out from a ce...

Spiral structure in galaxies- from what does it arise? Intuitively, it seems to come from spinning, but that can't be right, based on all the other flavors of galactic structure. I've read (or heard) that spiral structure is massaged into the galactic disc by gravity waves propagating out from a ce...

Spiral structure in galaxies- from what does it arise? Intuitively, it seems to come from spinning, but that can't be right, based on all the other flavors of galactic structure. I've read (or heard) that spiral structure is massaged into the galactic disc by gravity waves propagating out from a cen...

"I Never Thought I'd Get To Be A Million" (Moody Blues)

geckzilla wrote:I colored it the other day when it was posted to the Sky page on FB.

And a fine job you did !

On Pluto the Sun is between 150 and 450 times as bright as the full Moon as seen from Earth. The range of brightness relates to Pluto's elliptical orbit. Even when Pluto is at aphelion, you would have no trouble seeing stuff on Pluto's day side. I never would've believed the inverse square law left...

How can Juno survive, at Jupiter, on solar panels? I always thought the outer solar system demanded RTG's ?[/quote] 1) Juno has the largest solar array ever deployed on a planetary probe. 2) Battery technology & solar cell efficiencies have improved considerably since we last sent a spacecraft t...

OK, then. With all the space image processing, that makes even Pluto look brightly lit, I get lost as to how far out usable sunlight extends.
Thanks !

Dumb question : How can Juno survive, at Jupiter, on solar panels ? I always thought the outer solar system demanded RTG's ?

Besides not being able to see the full size and magnificence of Andromeda in visible light from Earth with your own eyes, another thing that gets me about galaxies in general, especially the ones tipped enough to our line of sight to see the whole thing, is that the light from that far rim may be (s...

OH....THAT IS SOOOOOOOO COOOOOOOOL!!!!!!!!!!! Could someone put a FULL MOON off to the side of it for comparison???? :---[===] * That's what gets me about Andromeda. On APOD, the writer(s) always refer to "gorgeous Grand Design island universes", and, in telescopic, spectrum-enhanced imag...