Starship Asterisk*

Star Colors and Pinyon Pine

Explanation: Beautiful, luminous decorations on this pinyon pine tree are actually bright stars in the constellation Scorpius and the faint glow of the central Milky Way. Captured in June from the north rim of the Grand Canyon of planet Earth, the shallow, close focus image has rendered pine needles on the tree branch sharp, but blurred the distant stars, their light smeared into remarkably colorful disks. Of course, temperature determines the color of a star. Most of the out-of-focus bright stars of Scorpius show a predominately blue hue, their surface temperatures much hotter than the Sun's. Cooler and larger than the Sun, and noticably redder on the scene, is giant star Antares at the heart of the scorpion. In focused, telescopic views the whitish disk at the upper right would be immediately recognizable though, reflecting the Sun's light as ringed gas giant Saturn.

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APOD Robot wrote:Beautiful, luminous decorations on this pinyon pine tree...

Or as we generally call them in the southwest, piñon pines.

That's a lovely image!

And a Merry Christmas to you! Here in Sweden, Christmas Eve is the big day of Christmas. On Christmas Day, we generally sleep the previous day off...

Ann

Ann wrote:And a Merry Christmas to you! Here in Sweden, Christmas Eve is the big day of Christmas. On Christmas Day, we generally sleep the previous day off...

And a god Jul to you, as well. We celebrate solstice, not Christmas, so we've already opened our gifts and eaten one of our goats and drunk some fine Swedish pear cider. And we've been sleeping it off since...

Just give gifts at the Epiphany when the Maji arrived in Bethlehem on Jan 6th then you could buy your gifts at the after Christmas close out sales and trees are free if not a little dried out

Merry Christmas APOD from Australia where it is 00.07 on the 25th of December And the temperature is a balmy 27 degrees Celsius and Melbourne has baked through an early summer scorcher. Thank you for a brilliant year of images. They always hit home for me when they include an earthly perspective. Looking forward to new revelations. And Happy New Year to all

To add to the Holiday joy here are some fun musings on Christmas's traditions and characters.
Happy Holidays to All!!

Would it be more precise to say that the nuclear reactions in the various stars determine their temperatures and thus their individual colors? And yes, I'm far out of my area of expertise in asking this!

Thanks, and have a very merry christmas all.

ceelias wrote:Would it be more precise to say that the nuclear reactions in the various stars determine their temperatures and thus their individual colors?

No. Stars are close to ideal blackbodies, and therefore their color is almost purely a product of temperature. (The apparent color can be modified by intervening dust, but that's a different thing.)

Of course, temperature is related to mass and the nature of the nuclear reactions taking place.

BMAONE23 wrote:Just give gifts at the Epiphany when the Maji arrived in Bethlehem on Jan 6th then you could buy your gifts at the after Christmas close out sales and trees are free if not a little dried out

Yes, the three Magi, who brought valuable medicines...potentially to promote eye health.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/article ... 8-0058.pdf

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/article ... -0074b.pdf

A picture such as this would be ideal to have a "rollover" second picture (displayed when the mouse cursor is on it) with the focus on the stars and the pine out of focus.