Starship Asterisk*

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

So nice to finally see JWST targeting Orion! And what a finely detailed Trapezium!

I find it impressive enough that Andromeda, although not hugely bigger than the Milky Way, contains a whopping trillion stars, and now this image suggests that there is PLENTY more where that came from! It's a trillion - and counting! (provided star births exceed star deaths)

Evolution of a Supernova Two images of SN 2023ixf in M101. The first is within a few days of peak intensity; the second from yesterday. 134 days of cooling off, from a hot, bright source to a cool, orange remnant. Orange because it has cooled down, and maybe because of dust scattering from a possib...

Quite the historical image! To me Hubble's discovery is way more staggering than all previous major revolutions in astronomy - the Earth is not flat but a sphere, it circles the sun and not the other way around - these seem like kids' stuff compared to trying to fathom that what was once thought to ...

Ann wrote: ↑Sun Oct 01, 2023 4:57 am It looks much like a painting

Indeed! Could be a Dali painting, that single tree lost in the middle of a desert already looks surreal, like some mirage, and then there is that eclipse on top of it…

orin stepanek wrote: ↑Fri Sep 29, 2023 4:36 pm I hope they find something out of this world!

Good one!

More like the Deep Purple Lagoon...Why this color? Good question, considering that just a little further out (seen in the full image at https://astrodrudis.com/messier-8-another-view/) the dust is much redder: https://astrodrudis.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/M8-Mos-SL10-DCPrgb-st-154-cCb-1816x204...

More like the Deep Purple Lagoon...Why this color?

Lovely dreamy nebula! Kudos to the husband and wife team who imaged this (a happy looking couple... I have a hunch stargazing can sometimes be an issue in couples, "Not tonight honey, I see clear skies!")

"like a penguin protecting an egg" - and getting destroyed by it! Maybe it's just me but sometimes these cute little images don't quite do justice to the cosmic magnitude of such things…

Not sure where I read this nor if I understood correctly, but by hitting the surrounding gas those jets would render it unsuitable to form other nearby stars and as a result the protostar keeps it all to itself to feed on and grow. Like some stellar darwinism!

There are many ways to try to fathom just how huge galaxies are, and when they are inclined in a way we can appreciate their depth as in this APOD, I tell myself: this is not a snapshot image of the whole galaxy 50 millions years ago, only the light from the front part may be that old, but the light...

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 ...

Spacetime is being distorted, which alters the path light takes. Because that is how gravity works. There is nothing circular here. Gravity is easy to understand if you can understand general relativity. Thanks for your answer! Yes I get it, spacetime is being distorted. What I don't get is what sp...

There it is again, the very familiar idea of gravity (be it lensing or just gravity in general) as "warped spacetime", which describes what we see, but does it tell us what is actually going on? I remember Feynman saying somewhere that general relativity does not tell us what the "mac...

I've never seen a comet that changed its appearance so quickly. The solar wind and radiation is really tearing at it. These are from this morning and from yesterday morning, so just 24 hours of evolution. Images are 2 degrees wide. _ C_2023P1_20230908.jpg C_2023P1_20230909.jpg Nice to see this in r...

Gorgeous dramatic colours!

No sweat, Orin. I remember that in his Cosmos TV show (from back in the eighties?), Carl Sagan said that humans and oak trees are closely related! I bet irises and orchids are a bit more closely related than that! :D Ann Go back far enough, and we're all related. Every living thing on Earth descend...

All a bit Death Star! Hi madtom1999, I don’t understand your post. Can you please explain what you mean? I’m having trigger trouble with my bipolar disorder brain… I’ll explain, I have reason to think that you are part of a conspiracy. Maybe even a deadly one. It’s not your problem but I would appr...

Great image, great object! To say that there is more than meets the eye in the universe is the ultimate understatement, and in the case of a globular cluster, the "more" in question that stuns me each time is that however densely packed with stars it seems, it contains far more empty space...

Superb and fantastic have already been used, I'll add awesome and breathtaking image!

In his book NightWatch , Terence Dickinson sure doesn't hold back, he calls it a "love affair"! Great passage: "Backyard astronomers are a special breed. They savor their moments under the stars. They have an infatuation - a love affair - with the cosmos that grows and nurtures itself...

And the nebula said, "Let there be light"!
I just love such close-up images of stars being born (S106, L1527 etc, now this brand new one), they leave me with a quasi mystical feeling of witnessing where it all begins.

Hmm. Of course pictures of Armstrong et al. on the Moon are testimonies of some of mankind's greatest achievements and it's wonderful to see such images. But please, please, let's not use the term lunar "selfie", an unfortunate anachronism! Those damn narcissistic selfies are all the rage ...