Starship Asterisk*

I am using Chrome 63.0.3239.132 as my browser and I also cannot drag perspective around: I see a split screen video only. This APOD description is not useful readers who end up with what appears to be a fairly common experience trying to view the animation. Some plugin clearly is not working properl...

Low mass stars nucleosynthesize Lithium from (presumably) lighter elements? This one is news to me. I looked around and found this paper which summarizes in the introduction. Until today I thought (essentially) all lithium was a primordial/big bang nucleosythesis product , because it fuses into heav...

As others have already remarked, those of us who grew up under Northern mid latitude skies are easily amused and bemused by how things look different significantly south of the equator. Between things being upside down, and seeing how close together regions, that are to us caelum incognitum, are to ...

How can the ecliptic plane be high during the day and low at night? Neufer provided a diagram and some others gave curt explanations, but if you are not familiar with thinking about the celestial sphere you still might not understand. Imagine the earth's equator and poles projected into sky. These ...

The thing I don't get about this picture is how a sharp single image of the movie projection was produced by 12 one minute exposures. Maybe 12 one minute exposures and one one second (or shorter ?; couldn't be much shorter because the does not look smeared) exposure? Somebody still has a Drive-in???...

I agree about the vertical exaggeration. It makes the craters look weird, like maybe someone went crazy with a giant melon baller.

I don't know if virii were the earliest...after all they can't reproduce in the current form w/o bacteria! But maybe something like them was.

Bacteria survive today in a world of macrophages just fine. It is a matter of reproducing faster than you are eaten.

200nm is pretty big. Virii with envelopes like Herpes, Influenza or Mumps viruses get into that range. One virus in the page APOD linked to , namely Parvo is only 25nm across. Still that is about 1.4 orders of magnitude larger than 1nm! I sent them a message. As to the relation to astronomy, Bacteri...

Chris has hit the nail on the head. If peroxides are being generated at some finite rate, and they decompose at some other finite rate, there is an equilibrium state that results in a finite concentration of peroxides. Just as oxygen is inimical to the presence of steel (as opposed to ferrous and fe...

What caught my eye was the sharpness of the edges of the satellite, where it meets black space. It's . . . It is likely wavelet and/or deconvolution processing parameters were chosen to accentuate this edge sharpness. . . . Personally I see no reason not to believe the detail shown on Ganymede is r...

It has been pointed out already (first by DemEnTEd_42) that when extended the streak does not quite intersect the flash. I did one up on him and actually fit a line to the streak(*) and extended it through the picture. It misses the center of the flare by a good 9 pixels. As such, any apparent relat...