Starship Asterisk*

geoffrey.landis wrote: ↑Mon Jun 28, 2021 2:29 pm I'm puzzled, why is the left limb of the moon outlined as a thin yellow line as it crosses the solar disk?
Is that an artifact of unsharp masking, or something?

Guest wrote: ↑Mon Jun 28, 2021 4:24 pm

Plasma.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLkGSV9WDMA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_True_Story wrote:
<<A True Story (Ancient Greek: Ἀληθῆ διηγήματα; Latin: Vera Historia or Latin: Verae Historiae) is a long novella written in the second century AD by Lucian of Samosata, a Greek-speaking author of Assyrian descent. It is the earliest known work of fiction to include travel to outer space, alien lifeforms, and interplanetary warfare.

The narrative begins with Lucian and his fellow travelers journeying out past the Pillars of Heracles. Blown off course by a storm, they come to an island with a river of wine filled with fish and bears, a marker indicating that Heracles and Dionysus have traveled to this point, and trees that look like women. Shortly after leaving the island, they are caught up by a whirlwind and taken to the Moon, where they find themselves embroiled in a full-scale war between the king of the Moon and the king of the Sun over colonization of the Morning Star. Both armies include bizarre hybrid lifeforms. The armies of the Sun win the war by clouding over the Moon and blocking out the Sun's light. Both parties come to a peace agreement.

After returning to Earth, the adventurers are swallowed by a 200-mile-long whale, in whose belly they discover a variety of fish people, against whom they wage war and triumph. They kill the whale by starting a bonfire and escape by propping its mouth open. Next, they encounter a sea of milk, an island of cheese, and the Island of the Blessed. There, Lucian meets the heroes of the Trojan War, other mythical men and animals, as well as Homer and Pythagoras. They find sinners being punished, the worst of them being the ones who had written books with lies and fantasies, including Herodotus and Ctesias. After leaving the Island of the Blessed, they deliver a letter to Calypso given to them by Odysseus explaining that he wishes he had stayed with her so he could have lived eternally. They discover a chasm in the ocean, but eventually sail around it, discover a far-off continent and decide to explore it. The book ends abruptly with Lucian stating that their future adventures will be described in the upcoming sequels, a promise which a disappointed scholiast described as "the biggest lie of all".>>