Starship Asterisk*

It can't be both on its side and upside down. If it's upside down, then it's on its back. Elsewhere I've seen it described as being on its nose. Which is it?

Has anyone considered the possibility that two equally sized objects, one dark and one light, collided so perfectly that they smashed together in such a way as to create the ridge seen? They would have to have been two half light, half dark objects that collided so perfectly that their light and da...

I have one criticism of the picture: MK2 is not big enough to be spherical, as depicted, it should just be a rocky body.

Odd, I got a live cat that promptly changed to a dead one.

I spotted a light in the uninhabited South Sandwich Islands, which seemed unlikely. A quick check and the fact that the image dates from 2016 confirmed what it must be: the erupting volcano Havfruen Peak on Bristol Island as it did erupt that year.

Are those meteor or satellite trails?

There is an article on the BBC news site about how far the golf balls went (not very far) here.

APOD Robot wrote: ↑Wed Jan 27, 2021 5:08 am For decades astronomers knew only that some spiral galaxies had magnetic fields.

Apart from the extensions, what else has the VLA revealed? Do all spirals have magnetic fields? Do non-spirals have magnetic fields?

So it was bluer in the past. Is there a version of this with time along the X-axis to show how the colour has changed over the life of the Universe so far and, if possible, project it into the future?

The group of galaxies in the bottom right corner seem to be separated from the others. Do they represent one of the smaller clusters that are merging to form the larger Hercules cluster?

I'll start adding to the list of famous objects visible in the picture with .... The Milky Way!

I'm confused. The smaller Ou4 does look like both a squid and a bat, the bigger Sh2-129 certainly doesn't resemble a bat whichever way I look at it. Yeah, I can accept a "squid" (though it has no tentacles), but I see no "bat" anywhere (not even as an alternate interpretation of...

The 'bit longer' reads as though it is suggesting that a month is longer than a year. It actually means wait a bit more than a day between pictures. Also the Moon doesn't return to the same point in the sky, if it did there would be no analemma, just a spot. It is more correct to say that it is the ...

Interesting. Does anyone know anything more about the lagoon? It looks as if it may be volcanic in origin to my untrained eye.

I remember one of the first exercises on my astrophysics course was working out the expansion rate of the Crab using pictures taken over a period of about a hundred years.

Are many of the background galaxies part of a single cluster or are we just seeing a line of sight effect?

The following broadcast from last week is relevant:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0009c2j