Starship Asterisk*

Chris Peterson wrote:The Perseids are a good choice when it comes to making images like this. That's because the radiant of the Perseids is at a high declination, so it moves slowly across the sky.

Good tip thanks.

Fantastic image with the Pleiades rising out of the wider dust field. I had the pleasure of attending a Damian Peach talk last week on images of Jupiter and spoke to him briefly. He was part of the amateur planetary imaging boom in the early 2000s and has built his skills since then.

Can't remember ever seeing a better flypast video/animation.

Mystery solved. There is a short video here which shows lots of insects flying through the shot, and a fine selection of images before and after totality.

Five very bright stars within 20 arcminutes of each other :!: :?: (The Pleiades are ~110 arcminutes wide.) I was wondering if the camera had been left in position until nightfall and they had been composited in later (using a longer exposure), but that seems unlikely. Perhaps the 'trailing' is caus...

geckzilla wrote:

Bob m wrote:why can I see stars in the moon?

Could be hot pixels, dust, bugs, or pretty much anything but stars.

I wondered that, but zooming in they appear to show the same trailing as the stars to the right of the climber. Would be interested to hear what they are.

That's superb, another gem from Robert Gendler. The Hubble/Gendler/GaBany M106 is my favorite galaxy image.

No, the cloud dissipated slowly. These are long exposures- I'd guess perhaps 30 seconds each. The exposures were 180 seconds each and there are four frames, 12 minutes in total. There are some more details in this thread . I suggested submitting it to APOD but if I hadn't I'm sure someone else woul...

Thanks for the heads up. Looking on here it's still at about mag 13, so I might have a go at imaging it later this month.

Catching up late here as I've been busy. Thanks for the responses and side-discussions everyone, very interesting.

On the subject of our Sun being well behaved, presumably in terms of flares and variability, is this partly a consequence of its slow rotation rate?

Something I'd be interested in learning more about, do we have any idea why Vega rotates so rapidly? According to the wiki article it is highly elongated and if it was spinning 14% faster it would break up due to centrifugal forces. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/Size_Vega...

It looks like a prop from an Ed Wood movie. Its thought that equatorial ridge (or lifebelt) is material deposited from Saturn's rings: http://www.planetary.org/blogs/jason-da ... mages.html

Nice illustration geckzilla. Couple of thoughts 1) With that many stars in that volume, at the center stars must be light months apart, if not closer. That would make interstellar travel a possibility. Yes, I believe the distances are as low as a few light days in the cores of some clusters, those t...

Had an interest as a child, I have vague memories of a small yellow astronomy book with Saturn on the cover that I was given when very young. As an adult the discovery of Sedna rekindled my interest, it really brought home how much "unknown" there is out there.

I guess we're past the point of useful discussion if you're disputing the dictionary definition of telescope. I doubt that many people would be persuaded that referring to a system like this as a small telescope is descriptive: https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5830/20563519706_207dc5d826.jpg My comment...

I should add, I find it quite an inspiring APOD - makes me wonder what i could achieve with my own imaging rig. I also own a 50mm f1.4 lens, it looks like this on a tracking mount: https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5830/20563519706_207dc5d826.jpg I won't be able to go as deep as the researchers' image w...

Nevertheless, there is no real distinction that needs to be drawn in an astronomical image made with an objective designed to attach to a camera and an objective designed to have an eyepiece. All that is really relevant is the aperture and the focal length- the key parameters for any imaging optica...

Sorry, looks like I wasn't logged in when posting the above. ^

One minor error I noticed in the description is that it was taken with a camera lens, not small telescopes. A camera lens is a small telescope. Not really, no, the 50mm lens in question doesn't provide much in the way of magnification. ;) (Optically speaking, the design of a camera lens is very dif...

Great image and an interesting bit of astro-archaeology. One minor error I noticed in the description is that it was taken with a camera lens, not small telescopes. The diffraction spikes on the bright stars caught my eye, a clear indication that a lens with an internal iris has been used. Checking ...