Starship Asterisk*

APOD Robot wrote:Connecting two stars in the far part of the Big Dipper will lead one to Polaris, the North Star,

Nitpicker wrote:

Boomer12k wrote:
OK, I'll bite... why are there star trails in the lagoon, and not in the sky?

If there were star trails in the lagoon, they would be right-to-left.
The lagoon was calm, but not perfectly calm.

• Which also explains why there are volcano trails in Chungará lake but not in the sky.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payachata wrote:
<<Chungará (hispanicized spelling of Aymara chunkara "pointed mountain") is a lake situated in the extreme north of Chile, in the Altiplano of Arica y Parinacota Region in the Lauca National Park. It is the 31st highest lake in the world (and the 12th highest in South America). It is near the volcanos Parinacota (6,348 m) and Pomerape (6,222 m). It was formed 8000 years ago, when a major collapse of the edifice of Parinacota produced an avalanche of 6 km³ of debris which blocked drainage pattern, thus creating the lake.>>

Nitpicker wrote:
Looks to be taken close to the Tropic of Capricorn, looking north.

• Coordinates 18°S 69°W

Nitpicker wrote:
I must have misunderestimated (don't y'all miss Dubya) the position of the horizon.

• Dubya the second-dimmest president of the United States...YES
  Dubhe the second-brightest star of Ursa Major (~ 5° above the horizon here)... no.

Nitpicker wrote:
I figured the lagoon to be a bit further south than 18°.

• World's highest lagoon

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=lagoon wrote:
lagoon (n.) 1670s, lagune, earlier laguna (1610s), "area of marsh or shallow, brackish water beside a sea but separated from it by dunes," from French lagune or directly from Italian laguna "pond, lake," from Latin lacuna "pond, hole," from lacus "pond" (see lake (n.1)). Originally in reference to the region of Venice. The word was applied 1769 (by Capt. Cook) to the lake-like stretch of water enclosed in a South Seas atoll.

lake (n.1) "body of water surrounded by land and filling a depression or basin," early 12c., from Old French lack (12c., Modern French lac) and directly from Latin lacus "pond, pool, lake," also "basin, tank, reservoir" (related to lacuna "hole, pit"), from PIE *laku- "body of water, lake, sea" (source also of Greek lakkos "pit, tank, pond," Old Church Slavonic loky "pool, puddle, cistern," Old Irish loch "lake, pond"). The common notion is "basin."

RocketRon wrote:

APOD Robot wrote:Connecting two stars in the far part of the Big Dipper will lead one to Polaris, the North Star,

Only if viewed in the Northern Hemisphere! Chile is rather in the Southern Hemisphere.

Case wrote:
Ursa Minor is of course home to some of the great galactic publishing and media corporations, such as Megadodo Publications.

• . https://www.themarysue.com/the-hitchhik ... alaxy-app/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Places_in_The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Megadodo_Publications wrote:
<<Megadodo Publications are the original publishers of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The company's headquarters were located on Ursa Minor Beta, in a pair of 30-story office buildings connected partway up their height by a walkway, so that the entire structure resembled a giant letter H. The relocation of the offices to a resort planet caused the company to lose much of its credibility among its customer base. One of the buildings was uprooted by a squadron of Frogstar fighters and brought to the Frogstar, in an attempt to capture and discipline rogue Galactic President Zaphod Beeblebrox. The Megadodo lobby is always filled with grubby-looking hitchhikers wanting to complain about the Guide's many inaccuracies. The president of Megadodo Publications is Zarniwoop, who is always too cool to see visitors. Megadodo was criticized by its customers for setting up an artificial universe in order to allow its editors and contributors to collect book information without leaving their offices. Notably secretive (or destructive) about their financial and historical records, the entire company was later (in the novel Mostly Harmless) bought out by Infinidim Enterprises, which stopped selling the Guide to hitchhikers entirely and eliminated all of what Megadodo had once stood for, much to the disapproval of employee Ford Prefect. The takeover was, in fact, part of a new plan by the Vogons to destroy Earth in all possible parallel dimensions – a plan that eventually succeeded.>>

chuckster wrote:How far from our Sun would a spacecraft have to travel, before the constellations began to change ? What would be the first ones to distort ?

Nitpicker wrote:I think the volcanoes and lake have perhaps been misidentified. The author's Instagram page suggests the location to be San Pedro de Atacama, which is very close to the Tropic of Capricorn. I suspect this APOD looks northwards over Laguna Miscanti, but I haven't yet positively identified the location.

Edit Correction: Laguna Lejia: https://www.google.com.au/maps/place/Le ... 68!6m1!1e1

TinyURL.com wrote:

The following URL:

https://www.google.com.au/maps/place/Le ... 68!6m1!1e1

has a length of 525 characters and resulted in the following TinyURL which has a length of 26 characters:

http://tinyurl.com/mlxwf4y

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aguas_Calientes_(volcano) wrote:

[b][color=#0000FF]Aguas Calientes Volcano on the right north of Laguna Lejía, Chile. To the left is the most active volcano of the region: Lascar, with constant releases of volcanic gas & eruptions going back to 1848.[/color][/b]

---

<<Aguas Calientes Volcano or Cerro Aguas Calientes, also called Simba, is a cone-shaped stratovolcano located 5 kilometres east of the Lascar volcano and 10 kilometres north of Laguna Lejía, Chile. One summit lava flow may be of Holocene age, but no evidence of historical activity is found. The volcano has a well formed summit crater. A small crater lake is found within the Aguas Calientes summit crater, making it one of the highest lakes in the world at an altitude of 5,870 metres. The lake has a surface area of 2,500 square metres and is tinged red from a population of microorganisms. The lake water is acidic and is frequently influenced by activity from Lascar, with winds carrying sulfuric acid and water vapour clouds to the crater lake. Precipitation was measured at 146 millimetres per year with most precipitation falling during the winter months, and strong UV irradiation. The lake has a bacterial ecosystem that is primarily reliant on photosynthesis but may also be influenced by hydrothermal activity from Aguas Calientes volcano. Research has found only limited numbers of bacterial taxa and a large number of DNA sequences that can't be identified as known phylogenetic groups. The lake has been studied as a possible terrestrial analogy to Mars.>>

http://highlakes.seti.org/ wrote:

---

High Lakes 2006 Scince Expedition.
CAPTAIN'S LOG #5: A Wonderful Nightmare...

<<Everybody is on the [Aguas Calientes Volcano] summit rim now, inside the crater. I cannot help it, I take a few steps forward. I want to see that lake. I hope it is worth all what we left on the slope. Worth? I am speechless. In front of my eyes, another crown jewel unravels, a magnificent ruby, a gem in the heart of an unlikely jewel box. What a beauty...The lake is so red that depending on the angles we look at it, it turns sometimes purple. It is now time to get into the crater and to the shores of this lake. Let's get acquainted. But before, I am taking a GPS measurement of the altitude. Including the lava cliff, Aguas Calientes towers at 5,930 m. The lake is at 5,870 m.

The red lake is about the size of that of Licancabur but rounder, almost looking like a red balloon. Its shores are circled by white deposits and the signs of a few ancient shorelines that are still marked on the ground. I take my poles and start walking around the lake, a first survey to see what is interesting and would be worth coming back to in a moment. Right away, some details are striking me: There is no life visible to the naked eye, conversely to Licancabur; There is no green algae, no algae at all for that matter. I continue. There is a small channel coming down from the rim. There is a little bit of ice still in it. I suppose that it is created seasonally by snow melt. That will be a place to come back to, especially the site where it connects with the lake.>>

Nitpicker wrote:Hi Ann,
So long as long URLs work, they don't bother me at all. I take it they bother you?

Nitpicker wrote:Hi Ann,

So long as long URLs work, they don't bother me at all. I take it they bother you?

Ann wrote:

Nitpicker wrote:
I think the volcanoes and lake have perhaps been misidentified. The author's Instagram page suggests the location to be San Pedro de Atacama, which is very close to the Tropic of Capricorn. I suspect this APOD looks northwards over Laguna Miscanti, but I haven't yet positively identified the location.

Edit Correction: Laguna Lejia: https://www.google.com.au/maps/place/Le ... 68!6m1!1e1

Tiny url?

http://tinyurl.com]TinyURL.com wrote:
The following URL: https://www.google.com.au/maps/place/Le ... 68!6m1!1e1
has a length of 525 characters and resulted in the following
TinyURL which has a length of 26 characters: http://tinyurl.com/mlxwf4y

Ann wrote:

Nitpicker wrote:Hi Ann,
So long as long URLs work, they don't bother me at all. I take it they bother you?

Well... yes, they turn me off a bit.

Also I don't trust them. Why are they so long? Do they contain anything, among their confusion of signs and letters, that may cause the link to break in the future?

As a Swede, I have to pay attention to the addresses of pictures I want to post. Any Swedish å, ä, and ö:s are no-nos is English-language addresses. And you can't even turn them into urls.

But I can see your point about tiny urls possibly hiding something, suicidejunkie... although I couldn't find your tidy, honest, unhidden url.

Nitpicker wrote:
Edit Correction: Laguna Lejia: https://www.google.com.au/maps/place/Le ... a,75y,90t/data=!3m8!1e2!3m6!1shttp:%2F%2Fwww.mountainphotography.com%2Fimages%2Fxl%2F20111015-Laguna-Lejia-Dawn.jpg!2e7!3e27!6s%2F%2Flh6.googleusercontent.com%2Fproxy%2Fk7uwE-rmd6dYjcE-JrJDK54ztf1WsgyLMYG4I3d_ALRajPLWtlY9XTPaPvLJJN4synjd_DzN6srAG7xY49T3w-mFYsEJJn0Hf_Nbu1N0mZGyDllHdU7fGP_XoUHinU2boBscwLHDPaZRn6y9BTQFtFoALEQVyZM%3Dw203-h135-k-no!7i1200!8i800!4m5!3m4!1s0x96a8393929418c3b:0x4dd31bbfdeeb088c!8m2!3d-23.4956101!4d-67.6930468!6m1!1e1

neufer wrote: Ann, who has criticized the URL, said she attempted to read the entire URL but failed to get through some of the details. "I wouldn't say -- yes," she told Nitpicker, "I turned through every page. As to whether or not I got through some of the details on some of the pages, no. But, yes, I attempted to read the entire URL."

Nitpicker admits he didn't read the full URL before posting it. Nitpicker said that since he was mostly concerned with edits to the URL, which didn't work the first time, so he paid the most attention to the edits needed to make it work. But he depended on his staff for most of the URL. "I read it as thoroughly as I could," he said. "You have an entire staff to really vet these things."

Nitpicker wrote:
My mistake. I didn't think it necessary to admit that I didn't read any of the legislation in the recent Republican health care bill in your fair union. God Save the Queen.