Starship Asterisk*

3) Why isn't Saturn brighter compared with the Moon? The albedo (reflectivity) of Saturn is considerably higher than the albedo of the Moon. Is it because Saturn is so much farther away from the Sun compared with the Moon, so that there is less sunlight for Saturn to reflect? Yes, it's because Satu...

gar1116 wrote: ↑Fri Aug 02, 2024 11:45 am

gar1116 wrote: ↑Fri Aug 02, 2024 11:43 am Beautiful picture. What is that string of white lights above Mars in the lower right of the picture?

That's the planet Uranus, which orbits much more slowly than Mars due to its greater distance from the Sun.

Spectacular. Aesthetically, is that JWST's best image?

@Ann - Could the lower object you've labelled be a bipolar outflow, with one jet hidden behind dust?

On Friday at times I also saw blue aurora, both in images and with the naked eye. I think it takes more energy to excite nitrogen atoms enough to produce the blue color as its a higher wavelength. Mostly I saw magenta (blue + red). I suspect the blue colour is caused when a particularly energetic st...

johnnydeep wrote: ↑Sun May 12, 2024 1:23 pm
The result looks like so:

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

Thanks johnny, I had to strip a channel parameter off my url in order to get it to work.

Amazing display on Friday night from Cornwall in the South-West of the UK. The pillars were bright rapidly changing, in subtle greens, purples and occasionally blue. Didn't know where to look at times, there were some bright transient features due South. Brightest display here for over 20 years I be...

In my opinion the intensity of the red and the swirl structure as a whole is largely processing artifacts. That is not to say comets can't have a spiral structure, just that what is seen here is (very) overblown. The spiral structure has been noted by other others and does appear to be real. There ...

Great timelapse, Knight! It's interesting that the two comets are so different. Comet Neowise, at least in your video, had a bright broad yellow dust tail and a barely discernible ion tail. For comet Pons-Brooks, the situation is reversed. The blue ion tail is very noticeable, but I can hardly see ...

That's a gorgeous image. Definitely a composite to get that much depth on Andromeda but it's been done very skillfully, it looks natural. I'll be keeping an eye on this comet. I don't believe it's expected to become more than faintly visible to the naked eye but it should be good through binoculars ...

That's a spectacular collection of peculiar galaxies @Ann. Or should that be a peculiar collection of spectacular galaxies?

That makes sense as does Ann pointing out that dust can have an effect on the color of a stars halo. Thanks for clarifying. Dust is a possibility but I also wonder if it could be an optical artifact, perhaps a reflection in a filter. It's very challenging to take such a deep image with such a brigh...

Just to clarify, the prominent point of light at 3 o'clock to Epsilon Tauri, is not the planet, correct? That's correct, very few exoplanets have been directly imaged and I don't believe any are within reach of an amateur telescope. The planet was detected in 2006 using the radial velocity method. ...

Color Commentator asks: This is a red giant star? Ann I wondered if the image had been mislabelled but looking on DSS the starfield matches. It's a nice image with the star framed by the dust but looks like something has gone badly wrong with the colour calibration. Which is strange, as there are p...

Okay, Chris (and Donald). What the heck is a 22 o halo? The halo is just a circle. How can it be 22 o ? Bear in mind that I'm unbelievably thick when it comes to math, so if you have to show me some math formulas, you may as well not bother and I'll just accept that the circle is 22 o and give the ...

The reason why NGC 2362 looks like that is that the B-type members are perfectly spherically distributed around the supergiant central star, Tau Canis Majoris. I know of no other open cluster that looks like that. Compare it, for example, with NGC 3293, which is quite rich, compact and spherical as...

The only cluster I can think of that bears the slightest resemblance to it is NGC 2362, the Tau Canis Majoris cluster. ... Ann Wow. Great call Ann, I was able to plate solve @johnnydeep's screengrab and that's what it came up with too. https://worldwidetelescope.org/webclient/?wtml=http%3A%2F%2Fwwt...

The Hurlers by Moonlight https://www.caradonobservatory.com/articles/the-hurlers-by-moonlight https://www.facebook.com/caradonobservatory/ Copyright: Michael Bennett https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53437791604_d2b0b7a7b5_c.jpg Original image link: https://www.flickr.com/photos/192659649@N06/534...

The witch's broom appears to be a functional space broom, it's sweeping dust away from the centre of the Veil.

I wonder if those large bubble nebulae are closer in nature to Barnard's Loop rather than something like the Rosette?

And hopefully I have managed to show you the approximate position of HH211, the star of today's APOD. Do note the fantastic long arcs of gas and dust in the picture! Think you've got it right Ann. It's part of the mostly hidden IC348 complex which is best viewed in infra-red: http://viewer.legacysu...

But another question, why do distant object not raise spikes? It's because stars are point sources whereas distant galaxies have a measurable angular size, with their light spread out over a larger area. (In reality any light entering the telescope will diffract but most of the light ends up in a p...

That's a beautiful image. But as for the background stars, can anyone help me? What is the bright star seen immediately to the upper left of the comet's coma? I'm thinking that it might just be Regulus, because obviously Venus is seen in the east in the morning, and Regulus should be somewhere in th...

I was lucky enough to see Neowise from Bodmin Moor dark sky park in 2020 and made this timelapse (the annotations on the stacked image were inspired by an APOD): https://youtube.com/shorts/iWtgyLQd8ik?si=jwvFZwrl9gh4qdw2 Unfortunately sounds like Nishiimura won't be nearly as bright and will be tric...

It's certainly active, I was able to photograph the aurora from Southern England. Let's hope it doesn't get too active...

Marvelous photo ! Both of them would have been travelling at a fair rate of knots - in different directions ? - so capturing them in the one image in focus must have taken some doing/precision . (As a sequence of images ? ) The technique is to track the Moon (any motorized telescope mount will do t...