Starship Asterisk*

APOD Robot wrote: ↑Fri Mar 22, 2024 4:08 amStill, Phobos is doomed.

Phobos has one thing going for it that most moons in decaying orbits don't, namely a nearby spacefaring civilization. Let's hope said civilization lasts long enough to boost Phobos' orbit.

Old tree? This tree is dead!

It has kicked the bucket, shuffled off its mortal coil, and joined the choir invisible.
It is an ex-tree.

Seems a strange place to launch from. There are less populated areas in China, and I'd hate to have to recover wreckage from a failed launch in those mountains. But it is fairly far south.

Typo: second sentence should read "two weeks ago."

Only because I'm certain APOD wants to be error-free: the second sentence should read "its 5.4 year long looping orbit."

Not that it matters greatly, but I notice a wording change this time, from APOD's usual "toward the constellation" to the traditional "in...." Am I the only one that finds the former wording somewhat awkward, and prefers the latter?

I'm just surprised no one has suggested that it's the famous Mutagenic Black Goo (and that once there's a sample return mission, we're all done for. We'll all turn green and have arms growing out of our backs). https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/ ... tagenicGoo

My first thought was that the lasers could damage the drone. I found out they are powerful enough to do so (each beam delivers 22 watts), but the beam diameter is 30 cm, so they'd do no more harm than a reading light (not to say that the laser might not damage the drone's camera, though). https://w...

My first thought was that the lasers could damage the drone. I found out they are powerful enough to do so (each beam delivers 22 watts), but the beam diameter is 30 cm, so they'd do no more harm than a reading light (not to say that the laser might not damage the drone's camera, though). https://ww...

If I try, I can make myself see a seagull. But no way do I see anything that remotely resembles a duck.

I expect tomorrow we'll find out there's a Leprechaun Nebula, and it'll look like a puddle of Guinness spilled on the bar.

I'd identify the view of Earth behind the roadster as the east coast of Australia, about an hour after launch, so it's morning there. What looks like a narrow peninsula jutting out from the coast I believe to be Fraser Island, about 80 km north of Brisbane. Am I right or wrong?

I don't think the public really has much of any idea of the sun's size compared to the earth, and a neat feature of this photo is that it gives some idea of the relative sizes of the sun and Venus, and therefore of the sun and the earth. Of course, Venus is only a little over a quarter to the way to...

I was very impressed by this picture the first time it was the APOD. https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap141103.html

...and hardly any of the lightning in Florida, which gets the greatest density of lightning strikes in the US. The storm was petering out just as it got to the panhandle.

The comparison to earth's Grand Canyon got me thinking, so I did a quick calculation. In terms of gravitational potential, Verona Rupes is actually about a tenth the "height." Miranda's surface gravity is .079 m/s 2 , so the potential at the top of the cliff relative to the bottom is appro...

It's an astronomical photobomb!

How long was the exposure? If you look closely, you'll notice short star trails.

These images make me imagine a pocket of partly melted ice either achieving high enough gas pressure to burst out through a weak spot, or a weak spot forming due to ablation of the surface or some other process, or both. The jet continues until it loses pressure due to a combination of fluid being e...

Nice picture, but kind of boring. Why is there no Milky Way and a thunderstorm in the background? Okay, I get the 'no thunderstorm part', but why no Milky way? :shock: Hasn't the time passed for taking APOD to task for the purty picture of 29 Sep ? Charon is another of those bodies that doesn't hav...

guest2 wrote:Why 2x the vertical? Please show same with 1x.

Just what I was thinking. Exaggerated relief helps bring out terrain features, but it would be nice to see what an actual fly-by might look like. And with a surface gravity of 0.29m/s^2, Ceres has plenty of relief already.

I expect Messenger's final resting "place" to be a widely diffused 3D distribution, something like a 2D normal distribution along Mercury's surface and a Poisson distribution beneath it. And lots of teeny little pieces. One normally conceives of "coming to rest" as occurring at m...

Is the streak left of Orion's belt a meteor? Above and to the right of Comet Lovejoy I notice a couple of streaks that appear to be aircraft, so I'm not so sure about the "meteor."

One of the things I like about this image is that it isn't what I expected. I was bracing myself for a picture of the Turkey Nebula, which of course would bear no resemblance to a turkey.
Happy Thanksgiving!

The disk has some interesting features. Notice the wide dark ring about twice the distance out from the second of the two inner dark rings. It has a broken lighter band in the middle. I see four darker areas, one pair 180 degrees apart at upper left and lower right, and a less distinct opposing pair...

I recognize the vantage point in the photo. It's taken from the south end of Jordan Pond, looking northward. The suggestive shapes are called "The Bubbles." As usual, I'm glad I was keeping abreast of APOD!

I immediately looked for the libration. Seeing so many impossible sky images in TV, movies, and photographs (especially involving the moon) makes me do an immediate reality check with every such image I see. I realized it was good for generating a stereo pair: https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3926/149...