It’s blows my mind we can calculate the trajectory of a “random” ass asteroid coming within that close to us. I can barely count getting change back.

Thank you for this, it's really interesting. It's got me reading through the Arabic star names: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Arabic_star_names

My youngest son is named Rigel, after the brightest star in Orion.

In spite of learning the original Arabic meaning, he seems to have forgiven me for naming him Foot.

[removed]

wait, there’s a guy in movie history dressed like a pirate?

Single shot at 1/200 ISO 100. Canon T6 + 102 mm telescope

[removed]

I think flying geese are UFOs more than people imagine. I remember looking up one evening and seeing these shimmering, silvery things overhead, flying fast. Fortunately I was able to watch them until they resolved into a flock of geese. Geese and other water birds have a substance on their feathers that helps shed water, and I think it also reflects light very well, with a silvery or metallic appearance.

Is Stellarium-like software powerful enough to show stars in the sky from other planets? Can we get a head start on prehistoric religion?

You can see the twins, Mario and Luigi

I, shamefully, learned this from the Big Bang Theory show....

I recall reading, or maybe hearing on a podcast, somewhere that NASA top branch were not aware before JFK announced it and learned about it from his speech - but I've not been able to find anything corroborating that anywhere I searched. I'm sure I read it somewhere and did not dream it.

Yes, probably. JFK actually proposed a joint US-Soviet manned moon mission, which was well received by the Soviets but never really advanced since he was assassinated a couple of months later, and LBJ shelved any plans for cooperation committing instead to Apollo.

That is an amazing analogy. Thank you

I agree with your first point, it's what the US and Soviets did in the 60s, but the NASA chief did recently literally say they were in a space race with China: "It is a fact: we're in a space race," the NASA administrator told Politico in an interview published Jan. 1. "And it is true that we better watch out that they don't get to a place on the moon under the guise of scientific research. And it is not beyond the realm of possibility that they say, 'Keep out, we're here, this is our territory.'"

Can we detect stars that are more than 70 light years away from us? Do telescopes make more stars visible from further away?

Really, any small group of bright enough stars can be imagined into constellations. The little dipper could be seen as the toilet of the gods in someone's mind. This means that Sol could very well be part of the septic system constellation from some other point of view.

This is more a testament to how large the Oort Cloud is since the sun is pretty average. Sirius is 25x the brightness of our sun, but the edge of the Oort Cloud is 200,000x farther from the sun than Earth is (Pluto and the Kaiper Belt are only 40x and 50x). If Earth was at the edge of the cloud, Sirius would be only 3x farther then the sun; so at 25x brighter it would be brighter. But within a 20 ly distance our sun is one of the brightest, and of the 130 closest stars our sun is actually the 7th brightest.

The Oort Cloud reaches out 3 ly, and for comparison our closest neighboring system, Alpha Centauri, is 4.3 ly. If you were at the edge of the Oort Cloud, our sun would be the 5th closest star to you.

Same reason you can likely see the bottoms of clouds at night, light pollution. Birds in light pollution against the sky look like faint glowing orbs and they seem to move really fast because they are quiet so your brain assumes what your looking at must be far away when it is actually very close.

Wow. That is a very sobering and existential thought.

you don't know we didn't. Perhaps they didn't think we'd spot them in arrow formation :P

I added a sample image of what I saw to the opening post...

>Starlink in the night sky

Yeah, I've seen starlink plenty of times now, I have paint.net'd an image below for comparision. SL above (obviously) and what I saw below, roughly.

[removed]

If they were geese, i want to know what makes them glow at night and fly that fast. :D

Chat with hot, young single stars in your local group!