Starship Asterisk*

neufer wrote:
image has been edited

The outer disk contains unusual light-year long orange filaments. The Eskimo Nebula spans about 1/3 of a light year ...

Andy, that parka must cost a fortune to dry clean after a blizzard.

rstevenson wrote:Dry-cleaning is not ordinarily necessary after a blizzard.

apodman wrote:Yeah, but my fur gets all matted and unmanageable.

rstevenson wrote:The description of this APOD says

The outer disk contains unusual light-year long orange filaments. The Eskimo Nebula spans about 1/3 of a light year ...

How does one cram a light-year long filament into a nebula only 1/3 of a light year wide?

http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/E/Eskimo_Nebula.html wrote:
Eskimo Nebula, NGC 2392

<<A planetary nebula in the constellation Gemini that looks like a face peering out of the fur-lined hood of parka. It was discovered by William Herschel in 1787. The parka is really a disk of material embellished with a ring of comet-shaped objects, with their tails streaming away from the central star. The Eskimo's face is formed from a bubble of material being blown into space by the central star's intense wind of high-speed material. The nebula is composed of two elliptically shaped lobes of matter streaming above and below the dying star.

Scientists believe that a ring of dense material around the star's equator, ejected during its red giant phase, created the nebula's shape. This dense waist of material is plodding along at 115,000 km/h, preventing high-velocity stellar winds from pushing matter along the equator. Instead, the 1.5-million-km/h winds are sweeping the material above and below the star, creating the elongated bubbles. The bubbles are not smooth like balloons but have filaments of denser matter. Each bubble is about 1 light-year long and about half a light-year wide. One possible explanation is that these objects formed from a collision of slow- and fast-moving gases.>>

http://www.universetoday.com/2009/03/01/comet-lulin-approaches-m44-and-eskimo-nebula/ wrote:
# Wetdog Says:
April 22nd, 2009 at 12:25 pm

<<The term “Eskimo” is...a pejorative in Greenland and Canada, where the majority of circumpolar natives are Inuit. In Alaska and Siberia, the natives are not only Inuit but also Yupik and Aleut. To call a Yupik an Inuit is akin to calling a Mexican a Puerto Rican.

Perhaps the term [“Eskimo”] fell out of favor because of the meaning of the word as being “eaters of raw meat” in Cree, a rival Native American tribe. Since the Cree saw that practice as barbarian, it was said with disdain. The French voyageurs most likely did not pick up on that, but used the word “Esquimeaux.”

So, a circumpolar native in Canada may be insulted because it would be politically correct to be so. A Yupik in Alaska is not so politically inclined to become a “professional victim.” I’m sure he rather enjoys having a nebula named after his Peoples.>>

neufer wrote:NGC 2392 is hourglass shaped and we are looking down the axis.

The light-year long filaments are consequently foreshortened to about 1/3 of a light year (in radius).

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap090503.html wrote:
<<Explanation: In 1787, astronomer William Herschel discovered the Eskimo Nebula. From the ground, NGC 2392 resembles a person's head surrounded by a parka hood. The Eskimo Nebula is clearly a planetary nebula, and the gas seen above composed the outer layers of a Sun-like star only 10,000 years ago.>>

(Distance= ≥2,870 ly)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo wrote:
<<The earliest known Eskimo cultures were Pre-Dorset Technology, which appear to have been a fully developed Eskimo culture that dates to 5,000 years ago. They appear to have evolved in Alaska from people using the Archaic Small Tools Technology, who probably had migrated to Alaska from Siberia at least 2 to 3 thousand years earlier; though they might have been in Alaska as far back as 10 to 12 thousand years or more. There are similar artifacts found in Siberia going back to perhaps 18,000 years ago.

There are two main groups referred to as Eskimo: Yupik and Inuit. A third group, the Aleut, is related. The Yupik language dialects and cultures in Alaska and eastern Siberia have evolved in place beginning with the original (pre-Dorset) Eskimo culture that developed in Alaska. Approximately 4,000 years ago the Aleut culture became distinctly separate, and evolved into a non-Eskimo culture. Approximately 1,500-2,000 years ago, apparently in Northwestern Alaska, two other distinct variations appeared. The Inuit language branch became distinct and in only several hundred years spread across northern Alaska, Canada and into Greenland. At about the same time, the Thule Technology also developed in northwestern Alaska and very quickly spread over the entire area occupied by Eskimo people, though it was not necessarily adopted by all of them.

Today the two main groups of Eskimos are the Inuit of northern Alaska, Canada and Greenland, and the Yupik, comprising speakers of four distinct Yupik languages and originating in western Alaska, in South Central Alaska along the Gulf of Alaska coast, and in the Russian Far East.>>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit wrote:
<<The Inuit are the descendants of what anthropologists call the Thule culture, who emerged from western Alaska around 1000 AD and spread eastwards across the Arctic, displacing the related Dorset culture (in Inuktitut, the Tuniit). Inuit legends speak of the Tuniit as "giants", people who were taller and stronger than the Inuit. Researchers believe that the Dorset culture lacked dogs, larger weapons and other technologies that gave the expanding Inuit society an advantage over them. By 1300, the Inuit had settled in west Greenland, and finally moved into east Greenland over the following century.

After roughly 1350, the climate grew colder during the Little Ice Age The Inuit were forced to abandon hunting and whaling sites in the high Arctic. Bowhead whaling disappeared in Canada and Greenland, and the Inuit had to subsist on a much poorer diet. Without whales, they lost access to essential raw materials for tools and architecture that were derived from whaling.

The changing climate forced the Inuit to work their way south, pressuring them into marginal niches along the edges of the tree line which Native Americans had not occupied, or where they were weak enough for coexistence. There is evidence that they were still moving into new territory in southern Labrador in the 17th century, when they first began to interact with colonial North Americans.>>

Andy Wade wrote:Then there's Kenny McCormick from South Park:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenny_McCormick wrote:
<<Kenny ("aristarchusinexile" ) McCormick is a nine-year-old fourth-grade student living with his relatively poor family in the fictional town of South Park, Colorado. Kenny is fond of toilet humor and pornography, and when it comes to sexually-related subjects, he is the most knowledgeable of the group. Others will typically ask for his explanation of sexual matters unknown to them. Kenny's lechery is also one of his prominent characteristics; his bedroom walls are frequently shown to adorn posters of bikini-clad models, and he has lusted over several girls and women over the course of the series, while also having dated two fellow female students.

Kenny's parka hood is always tightly drawn, leaving only his eyes (and un-animated nose) exposed. Sometimes, when he is frightened, he will tighten the cords on his hood to hide even more of his face. As a result, all of Kenny's spoken lines are heavily muffled. While his friends understand him easily, adult residents often have problems understanding Kenny's speech, requiring the others to translate for him. The effect of Kenny's speech is achieved by Stone mumbling into his own hand as he provides Kenny's lines. As the technique of Kenny's muzzled enunciation frequently implies, many of his lines are indeed profane and sexually-explicit, the lengthier of which are mostly improvised by Stone. Closed-caption encoding depicts Kenny's speech as if it were intelligible.

He first appeared unobscured by the hood in South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, where it was revealed that he had messy blond hair. In a cameo appearance during this moment in the film, Mike Judge provided the voice for Kenny's one line of uninsulated dialogue.

Kenny gets along generally well with his friends Stan and Kyle. Kenny's friendship with Cartman is more complex. Cartman often teases Kenny about his poverty, with Kenny usually reacting angrily. Kenny wrote in his will that he did not like Cartman, but "felt sorry" for him. On the other hand, it has been indicated that Kenny and Cartman consider themselves to be best friends. The two are often the only ones to laugh at the other's jokes or antics.

Prior to season six, Kenny died in almost every episode, with only a few exceptions. This was often followed by the catchphrase "Oh my God, they killed Kenny! ...You bastards!" (or some variation of it), usually said by Stan and Kyle, respectively. Stone and Parker revealed that when Stan or Kyle would exclaim "they" and "you bastards" to apparently no one in particular, they are actually referring to Stone and Parker themselves, as though they were an omnipresence within the show's universe. It was also common for a number of rats to suddenly appear and begin picking at his corpse.

Following his death in "Kenny Dies", he failed to reappear in several of the following episodes, having seemingly been killed off for good by the show's creators. Despite this, Kenny returned to the show less than one year later, first as a spirit possessing Cartman in "A Ladder to Heaven", then as his old self in "Red Sleigh Down". Since then, Kenny has died in only a small number of episodes, most recently in the Season 13 premiere where he died of syphilis.

In the book South Park and Philosophy: Bigger, Longer, and More Penetrating, an essay by Southern Illinois University philosophy professor Dr. Randall Auxier, entitled "Killing Kenny: Our Daily Dose of Death", suggests that the fashion of the recurring gag serves to help the viewer become more comfortable with the inevitability of their own death.>>

bhrobards wrote:Check out the helical structure near the edge of the upper, outer band in the photo. Its almost as if it were a toroidal Birkland current.

NoelC wrote:Hate to wade into the free association extravaganza with serious stuff, but I wanted to mention that once again a false-color Hubble image is being shown without it being clearly described as such.

The APOD text furthers this to the threshold of misinformation by describing "unusual light-year long orange filaments". Ground-based visible light images generally show them as more a combination of pink and teal (which by a stretch of the imagination could be considered "orange" possibly).

http://www.noao.edu/outreach/aop/observers/n2392.html
http://www.company7.com/sbig/images/eskimo_2kc.jpg
http://www.dilbertobs.com/images/eskimo2.jpg
http://ccarboni.home.att.net/NGC_2392_T ... Nebula.jpg
http://www.caelumobservatory.com/gallery/n2392cocs.jpg
http://www.kellysky.net/2392larg.jpg

• Awareness ribbon color chart:

• ----------------------------------------
  SEINFELD Episode no. 119
  New scene - Hubble in the HBC walk.
  ....................................
  Inuit #1: Hey, where's your pink & teal ribbon?
  
  Hubble: Oh, I don't wear the pink & teal ribbon.
  
  Inuit #2: Oh, you don't wear the pink & teal ribbon? Aren't you against HBC?
  
  Hubble: Yeah, I'm against HBC. I mean, I'm walking, aren't I?
  I just don't wear the pink & teal ribbon.
  
  Inuit #3: Who do you think you are?
  
  Inuit #1: Put the pink & teal ribbon on!
  
  Inuit #2: Hey, Cartman! Kenny! This guy won't wear a pink & teal ribbon!
  <Cartman and Kenny turn around and glare at Hubble.>
  
  Kenny: Who? Who does not want to wear the pink & teal ribbon?
  ----------------------------------------

apodman wrote:

bhrobards wrote:Check out the helical structure near the edge of the upper, outer band in the photo. Its almost as if it were a toroidal Birkland current.

Birkeland currents are real phenomena in aurorae.

I tried to find out if they are real phenomena in planetary nebulae, but all the references I could find were published by the electric universe and plasma cosmology lobby. Are there any references to Birkeland currents in planetary nebulae published by legitimate sources? Do Birkeland currents really exist in planetary nebulae?