Starship Asterisk*

What better way to start the New Year than with a grand galaxy!

Merry Christmas, Orin! I miss you, and I hope you're doing well. Ann Sorry to say, we've lost another long time member of our little community here. https://www.mckownfuneralhome.com/obituary/orin-stepanek I've only been here a short time but had already grown fond of Orin's sparkling comments. My ...

a kid's question: is the path covered by a photon from Alpha Centauri any longer if that photon is registered by the sensor in the waters' part of the scene? Well, if you want to be really technical, the photon that comes from Alpha Centauri never makes it to the sensor at all, regardless of the pa...

Rauf wrote: ↑Fri Dec 15, 2023 6:02 am

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

Quite impressive to see this unfold in real time! Whoever happened to be gazing at Betelgeuse at that moment without knowing about the eclipse must have thought "That's it!! She's blowing up!!"

Supernova remnants are tantalizing cosmic teases, we missed the best part of the show!

Good lord, Amaterasu rivals with the oh my god particule! Had this particule been travelling with a clock and originated a billion light-years away, its clock would indicate a one day travel!

Very interesting, thank you Ann for posting this.
"Both black holes appear the same size in the sky", yet ours is a stone's throw away compared to the other at 55 million light-years. M87* is such a BEAST!

To further bring this galaxy out of hiding, here's another very nice and recent image, finely detailed:

We've heard the Moonlight Sonata or seen the Girl with a Pearl Earring a zillion times but that doesn't take away their beauty! A dark horse head against a deep red background is an utmost stunning sight… One has to imagine seeing this for the very first time to be stunned over and over again (plus ...

Nothing against the ISS but the Sun here kind of steals the show! (and I also enjoyed the many hyperlinks, especially the "Sunspots" one)

Crab Nebula (one decade time-lapse movie: https://www.astrobin.com/327338/0/ https://www.universetoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/TimeLapse_ofCrabPulsarWind.gif Observation sequences of M1, showing the expansion of shock waves emanating from the Pulsar interacting with the surrounding nebula. C...

This image gives a sense both of sublime beauty and looming disaster!

Chris Peterson wrote: ↑Fri Nov 10, 2023 4:19 pm
The black hole is not visible in the Chandra image. What we're seeing is x-rays from a region surrounding the black hole.

Coud what we see be a quasar? (the wikipedia entry for UHZ1 emphasizes the quasar discovery)

A few days ago there were complaints here that some eclipse image seemed too little "scientific", well it sure is not the case with today's APOD! One of the links mentions that while smbh in the local universe are roughly 0.1% of the stellar mass of the host galaxy, this one would be of a ...

I’ll never get tired of the Crab Nebula and its story… If those Chinese astronomers knew what became of that sudden new "star" in their sky, a twelve light-year wide nebula energized by a mind-boggling tiny object spinning at an insane speed and a table spoon of which weighs a billion tons...

Hubble, James Webb, Euclid, - we are living, right now, in a GOLDEN AGE of astronomy!

Why replace it? You are falling here to what I call the "Billiard Ball Fallacy". The expectation that the operation of the Universe must somehow be intuitive, that every element must have some equivalent to what we see around us every day. Spacetime is a property of the Universe, and one ...

Two gems from the skies seen together, a comet and a nebula, with perfectly complementary colours on top of it! Well done!

In a universe where everything is pushed apart until all freezes to death, mergers are not duels but rebirths! - Galaxies, unite!
Spectacular sight..

Io is one hell of a moon… and a volcanologist's paradise!

M106 does have four arms, but one set of arms is "anomalous". (Or is that six arms, where two sets of arms are anomalous?) The way I understand it, the strange arms are made of gas, not stars, and their formation and creation has something to do with conditions in the center of M106. Yeah...

I love that image of M106 that Ann posted above, and reproduced below. It looks like it has 4 arms, three more reddish and one more blueish! M106 does have four arms, but one set of arms is "anomalous". (Or is that six arms, where two sets of arms are anomalous?) The way I understand it, ...

"And they stargazed happily ever after"

Popped down to New Mexico (just a 6 hour drive) to put myself on the centerline. Perfect skies, perfect weather (got a bit chilly mid-eclipse, though). _ seq_crop.jpg stages.jpg Eclipse 10-14.JPG Mostly cloudy but a slight chance of sun 8-) Eclipse 10-14-2.JPG Another cloud break to "C" i...

Clusters and nebulae and galaxies are awesome sights, but sometimes there's nothing like observing closely a single star. I find it hypnotic.