Starship Asterisk*

Love that starry sky over the Hurlers! I can see the Double Cluster, the Andromeda Galaxy and Cassiopeia! Ann Thanks, think this was just a 30 second snap with a wide angle lens, with a little light-painting on the foreground. Not much light pollution up on the moors. I now use Sequator for easy st...

neufer wrote: ↑Tue Mar 23, 2021 1:48 pm Yes, probably around a kiloton of TNT.

Thanks neufer.

If anyone is interested in a book on the Antikythera Mechanism I can recommend 'Decoding the Heavens' by Jo Marchant.

A daytime fireball was heard over much of South-West England on Saturday afternoon . Can anyone give me some idea of how much energy was released please? I'm guessing something like this is above a kiloton. Hopefully it will be possible to find some fragments, as with the Winchcombe meteor on 28th F...

There are about 1,300 surviving stone circles in the British isles, dating from about 3,300 BC onwards, along with countless other megaliths . We know very little about how they were used but astronomical alignments are suspected, possibly they were used as calendars as well as ceremonial sites. Som...

If you rotate this image 90 degrees to the right it looks just like a balrog, finally settling the age-old internet debate on whether they had wings.

Chris Peterson wrote: ↑Wed Mar 17, 2021 12:44 pm

Ann wrote: ↑Wed Mar 17, 2021 6:08 am Someone once said: The more time I spend with people, the more I like my dog.

I say: The more I see of Mars and Venus, the more I like the Earth.

Ann

Venus. Free of cold and snow!

The travel agent's perspective.

Faculty.ung.edu wrote about the picture: The HI distribution of the Milky Way was determined by using a technique in which the radial velocity of HI clouds is determined by radio spectroscopy of the 21 cm radio emission line of neutral hydrogen. These radial velocities combined with the known rotat...

Thanks Ann, I'd never seen the radio image of the M81 group before, very revealing.

Don't suppose you know of any neutral hydrogen images of nearby molecular clouds, such as Orion, Taurus, Perseus and Cygnus X?

Didn't know the zodiacal light might be connected to Mars. So in a loose sense, Mars could be said to have a ring system that spans the solar system.

Is Xi Persei in the photo? There are a number of blue stars here so I can't tell which one it is. Pretty sure Xi Persei is the bright star on the right. I believe it's a runaway star which just happens to be passing, and is responsible for lighting up the nebula. In IR it's possible to see the bow-...

<< Yet this strangest of all things that ever came to earth from outer space must have fallen while I was sitting there, visible to me had I only looked up as it passed. >> I'm not too concerned in this case, as the fragments that struck Gloucestershire were pebble-sized. If tripods do emerge they ...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-56326246 I was lucky enough to see the fall from 140 miles away. It appeared bright, orange (possibly due to atmospheric reddening, it was low to my horizon), and visibly fragmenting. Wish I'd thought to point my camera at the aftermath, it might have ...

Thanks for clarification @nlefaudeux and congratulations on a superb image. Just a request to the APOD administrators. This is a wonderful image, but most screens are in 'landscape' mode, and this image is in 'portrait' mode for no readily apparent reason. Please consider that when there is no real ...

Nicely explained in the mouse-over image, clear and concise. I'll have to take another look at my image to see if I have any hints of the carbon and sodium. Nicolas Lefaudeux has some other excellent images of NEOWISE on his site to complement the APOD. This animation showing a spiral jet is the sta...

Sa Ji Tario wrote: ↑Fri Mar 05, 2021 7:22 pm Uncle Jeff is Achernar, Alpha Eri

I believe Archenar is the least spherical star known, due to its rapid rotation.

Thanks for the clarification Ann & johnnydeep. Looks like the APOD covers both the Taurus and Perseus molecular clouds. The interesting feature I picked out in the WISE data is IC 348. There are some nice visual images of it on Astrobin but the ring structure only shows up in infra-red, a bit li...

Am I right in thinking the concentrations of dust are part of the Taurus molecular cloud? It's interesting to look at this area of sky in the unWISE data set. The most interesting feature is between the California Nebula and the Pleiades. http://viewer.legacysurvey.org/?ra=55.0843&dec=31.9136&am...

Was lucky enough to see a fireball over the UK a couple nights ago. Bright, even though a nearly full Moon was out, orange (possibly due to atmospheric reddening from my perspective? it was quite low to the horizon) and with visible fragmentation. Looking at the projected track some fragments may ha...

Mars has just enough of an atmosphere to really complicate landings... Yes, it certainly does , and air travel. The tricky thing is that with so little atmosphere, to get any lift, you have to go fast. You need to approach Mach 1 just to get off the ground, and once you get moving, you have so much...

Orion Revealed https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/pw/ACtC-3ezUCYTbbshXtsndrwdzAcmQkVIP75cWzhO37Gy8XmQQSqCnimqk4O24Nir5K79WQJEOgFRRfhNFY5kvFqhomxYsz2lyWykGBdTG9SVi_Y9TKoNY-l5yvKqew3TLv4Zsujy1-kIicOp5UCyGp5S3c76=w801-h635-no?authuser=0 A composite I put together to show what's hiding in the constellati...

Thanks very much, looks like it's the same palette as the all-sky image. So band 4 is the red light and band 3 is the green (which doesn't match up very well with the descriptions in the wiki article).

I wonder if anyone can help me understand this WISE image of NGC1499 please? NGC1499 WISE.jpg This is a low res image screen grabbed from World Wide Telescope but it shows the main features of the nebula. I'm having trouble understanding how the colour channels have been mapped to the four IR bands ...

Very nice write-up Ann. With its central cavity the Rosette also puts me in mind of IC1396, I guess that's at a similar stage of evolution? Here's a trio of my recent Ha images which show the apparent size of the Rosette compared to Orion. https://stargazerslounge.com/uploads/monthly_2019_04/1325352...

Very nice, but I was hoping to dive into and out of the Red Eye... but that is OK... it is like flying through clouds... awesome simulation!!! :---[===] * I'd guess the decision was taken to dive in just outside the red spot was taken so that the transition from white to red clouds could be show in...