Starship Asterisk*

neufer wrote:

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

orin stepanek wrote:
I liked today's APOD! Very neat!

I liked Contact also; but was a little disappointed in the ending!

Anthony Barreiro wrote:
One question: there seems to be moonlight coming from the West / right side of the image. Rogelio's website says the picture was taken on April 20, 2013 at 4:00 am, but the Moon had already set by then. Perhaps the light is coming from something other than the Moon, or the date or time are wrong. If that is moonlight, I'm surprised Rogelio was able to get such a good picture of the Milky Way on a night when there was a waxing gibbous Moon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McWay_Falls wrote:
<<McWay Falls is an 80-foot waterfall located in Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park that flows year-round. This waterfall is one of only two in the region that are close enough to the ocean to be referred to as "tidefalls". Originally the waterfall cascaded directly into the ocean but after a 1983 fire and 1985 landslides, the topography of McWay Cove was altered, forming an inaccessible beach. The waterfall now meets the ocean when the tide is in. On the edge of McWay Creek is a small building which houses a Pelton wheel, with signs that provide historical facts. Christopher McWay homesteaded the canyon in the late 1870s and eventually McWay's Saddle Rock Ranch was sold in the 1920s to Lathrop Brown, who built two houses at Waterfall Overlook. Although a detailed history of the falls has yet to be found, walking the creek from the highway culvert to the falls indicates that the last portion of the channel to the lip of the falls is artificial. It appears that the natural creek channel was along the lower declivity to the north (left) of the falls, which would have made a lower and less vertical cascade to the water in the cove. It appears that the re-routing of the creek to the present fall site was among the landscape changes made by the Browns in the building of the Waterfall House and grounds.>>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_%28novel%29 wrote:
<<Carl Sagan (November 9, 1934 – December 20, 1996) named his 1985 novel's protagonist, Eleanor Arroway, after: Eleanor Roosevelt and Voltaire, (whose last name was Arouet).>>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaire wrote:
<<François-Marie Arouet (21 November 1694 – 30 May 1778), known by his nom de plume Voltaire, was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit, his attacks on the established Catholic Church, and his advocacy of freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and separation of church and state. Voltaire was a versatile writer, producing works in almost every literary form, including plays, poems, novels, essays, and historical and scientific works.

François-Marie Arouet was born in Paris, the youngest of the five children of François Arouet (1650 – 1 January 1722) and his wife, Marie Marguerite d'Aumart (ca. 1660 – 13 July 1701), from a noble family of the province of Poitou. The name "VOLTAIRE", which the author adopted in 1718, is an anagram of "AROVET LI," the Latinized spelling of his surname, Arouet, and the initial letters of "le jeune" ("the young"). The name also echoes in reverse order the syllables of the name of a family château in the Poitou region: "Airvault". The adoption of the name "Voltaire" following his incarceration at the Bastille is seen by many to mark Voltaire's formal separation from his family and his past. "Arouet" was not a noble name fit for his growing reputation, especially given that name's resonance with "à rouer" ("to be broken on the wheel" – a form of torture then still prevalent) and "roué" ("a debauched or lecherous person").

Richard Holmes adds that a writer such as Voltaire would have intended it to also convey its connotations of speed and daring. These come from associations with words such as "voltige" (acrobatics on a trapeze or horse), "volte-face" (a spinning about to face one's enemies), and "volatile" (originally, any winged creature). Voltaire is additionally known to have used at least 178 separate pen names during his lifetime.>>

neufer wrote:

Anthony Barreiro wrote:
One question: there seems to be moonlight coming from the West / right side of the image. Rogelio's website says the picture was taken on April 20, 2013 at 4:00 am, but the Moon had already set by then. Perhaps the light is coming from something other than the Moon, or the date or time are wrong. If that is moonlight, I'm surprised Rogelio was able to get such a good picture of the Milky Way on a night when there was a waxing gibbous Moon.

It is a composite image.

Anthony Barreiro wrote:Aha. That's pretty crafty -- he used moonlight to illuminate the beach and waterfall, and then after the Moon set he had a dark pre-dawn sky for imaging the Milky Way. If it wasn't for you, Holmes, he might have gotten away with it.

Yahchanan wrote:Hey, that's a neat picture. But,

> A short hike was needed to reach this rugged perch

If you say so; but I have taken very similar pictures of that place while standing next to my car, which was parked in a turnout of a major highway (Pacific Coast Highway, CA 1).

Louise wrote:

Anthony Barreiro wrote:Aha. That's pretty crafty -- he used moonlight to illuminate the beach and waterfall, and then after the Moon set he had a dark pre-dawn sky for imaging the Milky Way. If it wasn't for you, Holmes, he might have gotten away with it.

Actually, the word composite is CLEARLY spelled in the APOD description, so before you so blatantly insult the author of the image or the APOD editors by insinuating that information is being hidden about how the image was crafted ("gotten away with it" implies just that whether you meant it or not) you may want to read the text that goes with the image. Aha...

Cheers,
Louise

Anthony Barreiro wrote:
By addressing Neufer as Holmes, I was taking on the role of Dr. John H. Watson, Sherlock Holmes' somewhat obtuse sidekick.

http://www.literature.org/authors/doyle-arthur-conan/study-in-scarlet/part-01/chapter-02.html wrote:

A Study In Scarlet Part 1by Arthur Conan Doyle
Chapter 2 - The Science Of Deduction

[url=http://www.lolroflmao.com/2011/07/28/nerd-brain-useless-trivia-social-skills-cartoon-theme-songs-comic-books-monty-python-quotes-math-obscure-science-fiction-references-science-internet-memes/][size=150][b][color=#0000FF]Neufer Brain[/color][/b][/size][/url]

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<<[Holmes's] ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.

"You appear to be astonished," he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it."

"To forget it!"

"You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of EVERy sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is VERy careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for EVERy addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."

"But the Solar System!" I protested.

"What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently; "you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.">>