Starship Asterisk*

The "phone booth sized" reference is likely to be meaningless to most younger people. I work at AT&T and, in our museum, we have a beautiful phone booth from the 1950's with a working pay phone in it. But I have not seen one outside of a museum in decades. We need to come up with an eq...

The Wikipedia article about red dwarfs has this to say: Because low-mass red dwarfs are fully convective, helium does not accumulate at the core, and compared to larger stars such as the Sun, they can burn a larger proportion of their hydrogen before leaving the main sequence. Why does helium NOT b...

As I approach the end of a rewarding and productive career in science and technology, with great privileges like working for more than two decades in Bell Labs Research, I still remember, as if it were yesterday, seeing this movie as a youngster. It was a significant influence toward my career choic...

So, the camera orientation is stationary relative to the the fixed stars, but the Earth rotates. As a result, the patches of snow on the mountain produce streaks that run approximately horizontal. However, the stars reflected in the lake produce streaks that are perfectly vertical. It is, of course,...

These pictures from Mars are always beautiful. But they should include an indication of their scale. I am trying to figure out how tall this hill is. Is it as tall as a person? Is it just a few inches? or would a person standing on top of it look like a minuscule ant? Without any scale reference, it...

Correction: There are four planets in the picture. Indeed, planet Earth occupies a large part of the frame. And I might argue that, artistically, the picture of Earth rivals the picture of the sky. It would be worth framing even by itself. Thank you, Mr. Tezel.

Maybe there's not much moaning and complaining, but there's surely not enough praise for whoever did this job. In my mind, this is not just a neat idea. This is a true work of art that must have required quite a bit of time and effort to put together! It's an imaginative and novel way of presenting ...

I wonder what trees those are. Their foliage seems not to change at all during the year (although the tree in the upper right lost a small branch at some point). So, they must be some kind of evergreens. But they don't look to me like anything that I am familiar with in the northeastern USA.

GV

the APOD explanation describes the comet as a "visitor from the Oort cloud"; but, with an aphelion of just 544 AU (inbound) it does not seem like it ever gets anywhere close to the Oort cloud. What's the reason why it's believed to come from the Oort cloud? Anyone knows?

Well, "what M31 really does look like" should not include foreground stars and other astronomical objects that are in the Milky Way galaxy, and not in M31. If the point-spread function of the telescope is known, it should be possible to subtract the images of foreground stars. A quick Goog...