Starship Asterisk*

It's about the season of Scorpius. This is a picture of the dust and gas clouds in the Sco-Oph-Lib borders: http://group.asiaa.sinica.edu.tw/whwang/Astrophoto/deepsky/images/w1024/2016_Sco_Oph.jpg This is a mosaic image of 25 panels, with a total of roughly 50 hours of exposures. A slightly larger v...

Milky Way Panorama http://group.asiaa.sinica.edu.tw/whwang/Astrophoto/sky/images/w2048/2017_MW_Pano.jpg It will be a challenge for APOD to present this image to its readers. It's a high-resolution, 24-frame mosaic image of the 360-deg Milky Way. Here are two alternate presentations of this image at...

BTW, I personally don't think there is anything wrong with combining two pictures in photoshop. That should be allowed, as long as the photographer clearly states what has been done to the picture(s).

An at least equally likely scenario is that the photographer combined two shots in Photoshop, misunderstood the realistic size of M31, and therefore came up with a wrong number when he tried to fake a distance.

Looks like we have a world record. The previous record holder is this one: http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/tallest-man-living and he is just 2.51m tall. Wait, not just one, the two ladies in the APOD picture must be also taller than the previous tallest man in the world. One pictur...

3 or 4 degrees of Andromeda only exist in rare photos or in catalogs, not in most pictures. Look at this: http://subarutelescope.org/Topics/2013/07/30/ This camera on the 8.4-meter Subaru Telescope has a FoV of 1.5 degree, and it captures most of the M31. The size of M31 you can see in a reasonably ...

Clouds of two colors http://www.asiaa.sinica.edu.tw/~whwang/gallery/picutres/M45_wide_2014.jpg This is a recent picture of mine taken on Maunakea, Hawaii. This wide-field image of the Pleiades shows dust clouds of two distinct colors. The blue clouds are all close to Pleiades. They reflect the ligh...