Starship Asterisk*

orin stepanek wrote:the buttes ... look like cardboard cutouts

apodman wrote:

orin stepanek wrote:the buttes ... look like cardboard cutouts

It's all part of a conspiracy to make the lunar and Martian "photos" look real by comparison.

SR82 wrote:I've been looking up at the night sky for many years now. But I have never been able to make out the Milky Way! I know where it is supposed to be, but can't see the diffuse glow of the main part of our own galaxy side-on relative to the rest of the night sky. I certainly never see anything like the "Milky Way Over Badlands" picture, beautiful though it may be. As far as my eyes go (and they are better than 20:20 with glasses) that picture may as well be of a different galaxy altogether, from a different planet! Does anyone else share this experience? (or lack of experience of what apparently should be a stunning sight?)

Vivian wrote:Forgive me to ask such a silly question.
Why did the Jupiter look so bright in the picture?

walkingoutside wrote:we've been wondering for months now--when something is photographed--such as Jupiter in this photo--why does it always have six rays coming out of it?

walkingoutside wrote:Hi! We're a homeschool family and we've been wondering for months now--when something is photographed--such as Jupiter in this photo--why does it always have six rays coming out of it? Why not five, or seven? We haven't been able to find the answer to this online.

http://www.photodo.com/topic_120.html wrote:
<<The aperture is an opening in the lens, made by a group of thin metal blades, which controls the amount of light that enters your camera to form an image. The aperture has two main effects on exposure – it alters the amount of your image that appears in focus, and it also affects how long you will need to open the shutter for the correct exposure.

The curvature of the aperture and the number of blades it’s made of has a direct effect on how smooth out-of-focus backgrounds appear. The more blades used the rounder the aperture, leading to smoother background blur, known as bokeh.

Another phenomenon affected by the aperture are diffraction stars. These occur when a strong point source of light is partially obscured in the image. The result is a bright, multi-pointed star radiating from the light source. The number of points on the star is influenced directly by the number of aperture blades. Lenses with an even number of blades create stars with an equal number of points, so a lens with a six-blade diaphragm creates a six pointed star. Apertures made from an odd number of blades create stars with double the number of points. A nine bladed diaphragm creates a beautiful 18 point star.>>

Andy Wade wrote:Crikey! Beaten to it! Twice!

tlc wrote:This looks fake. ... The Milky Way looks like it was taken from an earlier APOD shot that was wonderful.

tlc wrote:This looks fake. The power of any light it would take to actually illuminate the Badlands Wall and cast sharp shadows like that is beyond anything I know of. The foreground is weeds/grass etc and casts shadows on the cutouts behind.

Chris Peterson wrote:You actually need a very dark location to avoid having the foreground lit by scattered light pollution, which would have made this peculiar lighting effect impossible.

Joe Stieber wrote:if I travel ... to the southern NJ Pinelands, the summer Milky Way billows on a clear night

Nancy D wrote:I thought the horse didn't exist in North America until the Spanish brought them over. Why would there be fossils of ancestors of the horse in the badlands?

bystander wrote:

Nancy D wrote:I thought the horse didn't exist in North America until the Spanish brought them over. Why would there be fossils of ancestors of the horse in the badlands?

Primitive horses show up in the Americas several times, including close relatives of the modern domestic horse. However, all species became extinct in the Americas 11,000 years ago until their reintroduction in the 15th and 16th centuries CE.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_ ... ern_horses

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_horse wrote:
<<Horses were absent from the Americas until the Spanish Conquistadors brought domestic horses from Europe, beginning in 1493, and escaped horses quickly established large wild herds. The early naturalist Buffon suggested in the 1760s that this was an indication of inferiority of fauna in the New World, then later reconsidered this idea. William Clark's 1807 expedition to Big Bone Lick found "leg and foot bones of the Horses" which were included with other fossils sent to Thomas Jefferson and evaluated by the anatomist Caspar Wistar, but neither commented on the significance of this find.

During the Beagle survey expedition the young naturalist Charles Darwin had remarkable success with fossil hunting in Patagonia. On 10 October 1833 at Santa Fe, Argentina, he was "filled with astonishment" when he found a horse's tooth in the same stratum as fossil giant armadillos, and wondered if it might have been washed down from a later layer, but concluded that this was "not very probable". After the expedition returned in 1836 the anatomist Richard Owen confirmed that the tooth was from an extinct species which he subsequently named Equus curvidens, and remarked that "This evidence of the former existence of a genus, which, as regards South America, had become extinct, and has a second time been introduced into that Continent, is not one of the least interesting fruits of Mr. Darwin's palæontological discoveries."

In 1848 a study On the fossil horses of America by Joseph Leidy systematically examined Pleistocene horse fossils from various collections including that of the Academy of Natural Sciences and concluded that at least two ancient horse species had existed in North America: Equus curvidens and another which he named Equus americanus. A decade later, however, he found that the latter name had already been taken and renamed it Equus complicatus.

The original sequence of species believed to have evolved into the horse was based on fossils discovered in North America in the 1870s by paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh. The sequence, from Hyracotherium (popularly called Eohippus) to the modern horse (Equus), was popularized by Thomas Huxley and became one of the most widely-known examples of a clear evolutionary progression. The horse's evolutionary lineage became a common feature of biology textbooks, and the sequence of transitional fossils was assembled by the American Museum of Natural History into an exhibit which emphasized the gradual, "straight-line" evolution of the horse.

Since then, as the number of equid fossils has increased, the actual evolutionary progression from Hyracotherium to Equus has been discovered to be much more complex and multi-branched than was initially supposed. The straight, direct progression from the former to the latter has been replaced by a more elaborate model with numerous branches in different directions, of which the modern horse is only one of many. It was first recognized by George Gaylord Simpson in 1951 that the modern horse was not the "goal" of the entire lineage of equids, it is simply the only genus of the many horse lineages that has happened to survive.>>

Chris Peterson wrote:

tlc wrote:This looks fake. The power of any light it would take to actually illuminate the Badlands Wall and cast sharp shadows like that is beyond anything I know of. The foreground is weeds/grass etc and casts shadows on the cutouts behind.

An ordinary flashlight is probably enough; a hand held searchlight certainly so. Compared with the brightness of the Milky Way, these are very bright. Make a long enough exposure to capture the sky and it will be long enough to show the artificially illuminated hills. You actually need a very dark location to avoid having the foreground lit by scattered light pollution, which would have made this peculiar lighting effect impossible.

neufer wrote:The flashlight source somewhat in front of camera is no doubt the cause of the fake overall appearance. There are virtually no shadows to give any definition to the flattened Wall (while flashlight shadows do give definition to the nearby grass). The flashlight should have been used well off to the side.

Chris Peterson wrote: Well, I don't know what you mean by "should". If the flashlight were located differently, the effect would be different. But none of Wally's pictures come close to showing anything that I'd describe as "real"; they are his aesthetic interpretations. So what you would do and what he would do are likely different.