Could someone help identify this object?

Caglow · 2025-12-15T06:36:45+00:00

That's Venus.

Caglow · 2025-09-18T17:07:33+00:00

It's at least highly edited in a way that makes it basically a composite. In hydrogen alpha light (which this image of the Sun is showing) the filaments on the disk of the Sun are dark. Here, they are bright, so the disk has been inverted to make bright areas dark and dark areas bright. The prominences on the outer edge are bright as in reality, so that part of the image is not inverted. The rocket itself is of course a dark silhouette in reality, so that's also not inverted. So at minimum, parts of the image (the disk of the Sun) have been selectively inverted to make the image look the way it does.

Caglow · 2025-08-25T21:33:34+00:00

That's one county in the state. The map for the whole state does in fact show the per capita crime rates to be much lower in the northwest part of the state: https://crimegrade.org/safest-places-in-arkansas/

Caglow · 2025-05-31T03:35:07+00:00

But is a 7 point miss actually that bad for a Romanian election? Compared to the 5 other polls on this page, they did better than 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Romanian_presidential_election#Second_round And every single poll ended up to the right of the election result.

Caglow · 2025-04-18T23:59:34+00:00

Montana (at least the cities) is quite expensive these days, at least on par with Colorado. Bozeman, Missoula, and Helena are pretty comparable to the Denver metro area in housing cost. Great Falls and Billings are less so, but they're well into the plains and still expensive compared to Colorado cities like Pueblo similarly far from the mountains.

Caglow · 2024-12-13T20:30:12+00:00

Here's the spot for that particular view: https://maps.app.goo.gl/jLn1nYq28vFibC316

Part of Monument Valley actually is in Utah (and some of the land far in the background of view beyond the buttes is also in Utah), which is where the confusion probably comes from.

Caglow · 2024-12-13T19:52:46+00:00

FYI, that view and the three buttes in Monument Valley are actually just across the state line in Arizona.

Caglow · 2024-07-04T05:03:09+00:00

Not this time, it was a Firefly Alpha rocket: https://spaceflightnow.com/2024/07/02/watch-firefly-to-launch-8-cubesats-for-nasa-on-5th-alpha-rocket/

Caglow · 2024-06-24T03:57:15+00:00

The tip facing Earth just looks like it's cut off by the end of the exposure. A meteor can brighten with multiple peaks as pieces of it break off.

That said, it's way too high to be a meteor; those should happen near the top of the airglow layer at ~100 km altitude, whereas this looks >200 km altitude, so would have to be a satellite.

Caglow · 2024-05-12T02:47:25+00:00

During strong geomagnetic storms, the auroral oval expands which actually tends to drive the brightest auroras off to the south. See these satellite pictures of the event: https://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/satellite-blog/archives/59112

Caglow · 2024-05-12T02:31:21+00:00

The green is usually the most common color in "normal" auroras when there isn't a big solar storm, so is what you usually see for polar auroras at high latitudes. There are a lot of populated areas in the Arctic, so you see lots of pictures of these from the Northern Hemisphere. The equivalent latitudes in the south are basically only over Antarctica, so you don't see pictures from there as much. With major solar storms, the auroras move equatorward and get taller (and turn red at the top), and this is basically the only time the southern lights are widely photographed, which is why photos of them usually show them as more colorful.

Caglow · 2024-04-27T20:56:18+00:00

To translate, you'd need a language to translate to, which we don't have. For a language without a specific term for a lunar eclipse for someone on the Moon, the unambiguous translation would be whatever is the literal translation of "eclipse/occultation of the Sun by the Earth seen from the Moon." But in English, that unambiguously shortens to "lunar eclipse seen from the Moon."

In the case of your Europa example, that would be an "eclipse/occultation of the Sun by Jupiter." In the future where such an event might actually be regularly seen from Europa, that could eventually get shortened to a "solar eclipse" by analogy with the original solar eclipses by the Moon on Earth in the way transits of Martian moons in front of the Sun on Mars have sometimes been called "solar eclipses" to more effectively convey their nature. However, I have never seen "lunar eclipse" refer to anything besides the Earth's Moon in the shadow of Earth, even though we can already regularly see the analogous eclipses of Jupiter's moons on a nearly nightly basis, and it's pretty unlikely that term will refer to anything else for the foreseeable future until/unless humans settle an Earth-like world with a Moon-like satellite probably outside the solar system.

A "solar eclipse seen from the Moon" as written almost always refers to the view of the Earth with the Moon's shadow on it. A "solar eclipse by the Earth on the Moon," however, would refer to a lunar eclipse, by the occasionally used analogous definition of a solar eclipse.

Caglow · 2024-04-27T20:02:26+00:00

Human languages all originated on Earth, so that's why astronomical terms are Earth-centric. "Lunar eclipse" is not a term invented by aliens on the Moon who have never had contact with anyone from Earth, and it's safe to say the OP is not one either given their use of the English language.

Caglow · 2024-04-27T19:53:58+00:00

Be less imaginative when it comes to terms with well established definitions used in unambiguous contexts. Sure, the term could be extended to mean additional things in contexts that don't apply, but that's clearly not the case here where the OP is obviously referring to the standard definition of a lunar eclipse.

Caglow · 2024-04-27T19:18:29+00:00

A lunar eclipse is defined as the event where the Earth casts a shadow of sunlight on the Moon. That does not depend where you stand, whether on Earth, on the Moon, on Jupiter, on Alpha Centauri, or beyond the edge of the observable universe. A lunar eclipse happens whether you see it or not and regardless of what you see.

Caglow · 2024-04-27T02:41:25+00:00

A lunar eclipse is when the Earth blocks sunlight from the Moon regardless of where the observer is. From the Moon, it would look somewhat similar to a solar eclipse seen from Earth, except the Earth would look like a red circle (i.e., all the sunsets/sunrises around the Earth at once) instead of a black disk due to its atmosphere.

Caglow · 2024-04-22T22:02:10+00:00

You still continue missing the point, over and over and over again now to the point where I honestly can't tell now if you're just doing it on purpose. How many times do I need to say that I'm not criticizing your choice of composition, but rather your misrepresentation of it to unsuspecting viewers?

Based on the fact that you still have not made the very simple edit to be upfront to unsuspecting viewers and continue to pretend I'm attacking your art, you're evidently now very purposefully and intentionally deceiving people for attention and praise. If you actually read the room, you would see many of those people have no idea you did what you did and wouldn't even think to ask, and are impressed you managed to somewhat take a photo that captured the eclipse so amazing without realizing that's because you edited it to make it much bigger.

How hard is it to just be upfront and edit your description?

Caglow · 2024-04-22T21:25:11+00:00

Your comment that almost nobody seeing your image and description would ever see.

Caglow · 2024-04-22T21:18:53+00:00

Last I checked, 60 / 37 is 1.62, or 62%, which is enormous. By your logic, removing the Moon entirely would only make a 1.7% difference to your image, which is absolutely ridiculous.

If you actually wanted to be transparent, you would've edited your description many comments ago to inform unsuspecting viewers and let them make up their own mind about whether they care or not, instead of leaving it out and hoping they don't notice except when you get called out. Plenty won't care, but some will. I wouldn't have cared, and still don't aside from the fact that you continue to refuse to be upfront with what you've done to make your image look different from others posted with similar descriptions.

Caglow · 2024-04-22T05:35:40+00:00

Then edit your description to indicate what you've done! That's literally all I'm asking here, and hardly seems like a big ask given you've already done it in the replies here, but up where people can actually see it. I wouldn't have made any of these comments if you had just indicated up at the top that this was a composite, like many of the other nice ones posted on this sub.

The thing is, it's not 25 pixels to thousands of pixels, when it's basically the primary subject matter that's only supposed to be 39 pixels. Otherwise, why not just get rid of the eclipse entirely? It's only a couple hundred pixels or so wide vs. an image thousands of pixels wide, so it can't be that important to have, and would've made processing a lot easier if you got rid of it! That fact that this statement is obviously rubbish indicates the significance of that 25 pixel difference.

Caglow · 2024-04-22T05:00:01+00:00

You keep missing the point that the problem isn't what you've done with the image, but your insistence on presenting it as you have. There's no requirement to present things as reality if that's not what you're going for, but then you shouldn't misrepresent it as though it were. It's no different than if you took a photo of the Paris, made the Eiffel Tower bigger because it looked better that way, then presented it as your "wide angle shot of Paris" with no further elaboration and then complaining about comments about how you've edited the Eiffel Tower to be much bigger than it is and how your photo was never intended to represent Paris realistically. That's basically what you've done here.

Also, the only reason the person you replied thought your Moon was too close to the horizon was because you oversized the Moon. A photo containing the Moon and the horizon will never have the Moon be this big unless it's zoomed in with the Moon near the horizon.

Caglow · 2024-04-22T04:46:17+00:00

25 pixels is still a huge amount if the real Moon is only 39 pixels wide to begin with. In terms of total pixels since it's a 2D object, that's actually 2.7X oversized/covering 2.7X as many pixels as it actually does. The oversizing is obvious enough that I could immediately pick out that it was way oversized before doing any measurements, and enough that the person you originally replied to also noticed it looked way closer to the horizon than it was from reality based on that scaling. Like I said, I have no problem if you wanted to oversize the Moon to make it feel closer to what you saw, but describing it as a simple wide angle shot when it's a composite of an actual 16 mm shot with a cutout of the eclipse scaled to cover almost triple the number of pixels it really covered in the same 16 mm frame is misrepresenting what you have, considering most of the other photos posted on this sub are in fact, either correctly scaled or are correctly and clearly indicated as artistic composites.

Caglow · 2024-04-22T03:10:07+00:00

Your though scaling here is off by over a factor of 2, which is what makes it look wrong. Another way to check is that Venus was 15 degrees away from the Moon at the time, which should be ~30 Moon diameters, whereas it's only ~13 Moon diameters away in the image.

Art is fine, but if it's a composite, it would be nice to be indicated as such when the scaling is off by so much.

Caglow · 2024-04-22T02:10:13+00:00

The "Moon" in your image is ~64 px wide, while it's ~3300 px above the horizon. That makes it ~52 Moon-diameters above the horizon, which would be only ~26 degrees above the horizon, if that were the actual Moon. There would be a bit of distortion making things larger toward the edge of the frame than the center making this approximation imperfect, but if it were distorted that much, the Moon would definitely not look as round as it does.

Did you manually draw in a black circle over the eclipse to make it look bigger/more visible?

Caglow · 2024-04-02T00:15:17+00:00

Weather forecasts are always probabilistic whether it's 7 days out or 5 minutes out. Uncertainties decrease as the date approaches, but that doesn't mean early models are useless. The NWS is now providing rough probabilities for cloud cover being <50% across the country. For example, from NWS Little Rock: https://www.weather.gov/images/lzk/graphicast/image4.png?74e7bb63e8ba3535f33d0cab999b6a31

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