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I like this one.
19
This annoys so many chemists. :)
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I dare an "answer". God's finger is a natural joke from the heavens. (Don't take it personally, it is meant to all of us)
16
Three astronomers go out for dinner at a conference - an optical astronomer, an X-ray astronomer and a neutrino astrophysicist.
Incredibly, when the soup arrives, they all have a fly swimming about in it.
The optical astronomer uses his spoon to flip the fly out, splashing a lot of soup all over the table in the process.
The X-ray astronomer carefully ...
15
Here's one from earlier today.
Mobile phone camera, held above 4.5mm eyepiece, connected to 80mm aperture 560mm focal length refractor:
Will try again tomorrow with a different camera.
14
So, I've been going outside for the past couple days to get what photos I can, in case it's cloudy the day of the actual conjunction. Turns out that the two already look great, and after a couple of days of fiddling around with taking the actual lens off of my camera and trying to take photos directly from my telescope's eyepiece, I managed to snag some not-...
13
I didn't participate on the previous Astronomy site, but you can read about the reason it was shut down in When a Site Grows Quiet. The key point is:
But when a site struggles to maintain any semblance of steady progress — when it's struggling to garner an audience, a healthy core of experts, and a steady stream of questions — it becomes increasingly ...
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No, this is a network-wide change to all beta sites.
11
I am an IAU Member but a lot of professional astronomers, particularly junior scientists, aren't. The membership rules are slightly weird/archaic. You can only apply to join every three years when they are going to be holding the General Assembly (Past General Assemblies, next General Assembly will be in Busan, Korea in 2021). You have to submit a qualified ...
11
I also added this to the topic guidelines in the Help Center:
My question about Pluto got removed. How is that off topic?
Was it really a question, or was it a rant about why you think the IAU decision to reclassify Pluto should be reversed? We don't welcome rants-as-questions here period, but we are especially tired of this particular rant. Please stop. If ...
11
Is it that Pluto scientists worried about reduced funding or status?
I did some searching to see if and how the classification as a planet would matter.
According to a piece by the Atlantic:
A planetary designation may be largely cultural, but that doesn't mean it isn’t meaningful. Funding for research relies on popular understanding. Surely it helps when ...
11
The meta site is for asking questions or commenting on Astronomy SE's policies and procedures - actually, just like the question you have asked, congratulations!
The "beta" site is the main site where you actually ask questions about astronomy and astrophysics - check that your question is "on-topic" here.
Just have a look at the first 10 ...
11
I would say generally no. Instead, someone should take the time to edit the question to make it more clear, now that the accepted answer makes it apparent what was being asked.
There are exceptions though. Every once in a while we get an asker who is uninformed enough about the topic at hand that they will accept an answer that doesn't even accurately ...
11
Remove the "pin to top" behaviour.
I want this behaviour to be removed. An accepted answer should be sorted in the same way as all answers.
10
Quantum mechanics = best mechanics
And this one is on my schools maths classroom
10
What kind of songs do the planets like to sing?
Nep-tunes
What does an astronomer blow with gum?
Hubbles
A neutrino walks into a bar...and keeps right on going...
Yeah, these were awful but great...
10
I'm glad this has been asked on Meta, as it's a much more appropriate place to discuss how to approach such issues - comments or chat are limited in their usefulness.
My view is that this is shouldn't be about whether a question is based on evidence presented on "certain YouTube channels", but about whether the question itself has value.
So what is "value"...
answered Apr 20 '19 at 3:19
Chappo Hasn't Forgotten Monica
1,1681 gold badge7 silver badges11 bronze badges
10
The point of astrology is making predictions about human affairs from the positions of celestial bodies. This is pseudoscience: there is no empirically observed pattern (if we leave out the weather and climate effects of the sun and tides) and people usually just assign traditional interpretations. However, motivated by astrology people have been doing ...
10
I would love to see a histogram of how many questions have 0, 1, 2, 3, ... answers
A while ago I wrote a query for this for this MathOverflow answer, to demonstrate that it seems to follow Zipf's Law. When I run it for Astronomy, I get the following graph:
(both axes are logarithmic)
If you want raw results, this query is better:
Number of answers
...
10
When I see a typo on Wikipedia, I fix it.
When I see a typo here, I don't.
Why? Because "tiny, trivial edits are discouraged" (from the help center: https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/edit). You have to change more than 6 characters, and I don't want to spend time to artificially alter a post when everything but the typo is fine. ...
9
Poor Disney...
9
You're right, just about every one of those is off topic (ok, some may be borderline), and many of them are already closed. I don't really see much of an on-topic use for this tag anyway, so it really needs to go.
9
Beta sites don't have regular elections like graduated sites. Basically, elections only occur on an as needed basis. I've requested to have an election to bring on another mod, and the CM team says it's slated at some point in the future (no specific dates yet).
9
I'm usually in favor of linking to the abstract rather than the pdf. On Stack Exchange, chances are good that unless someone is looking for a figure (which should arguably just be in the answer), they're unlikely to read the entire paper; therefore, sending them directly there seems like overkill. Plus, abstracts can provide additional useful information ...
9
There is no rule that we all have to agree on answers. A great thing about SE is that the community can vote answers up or down, and the OP can choose the answer they think is the best.
It is wonderful if you can clearly, definitively, answer a question. But if the asker doesn't understand your answer even after attempts to clarify, that is also perfectly ...
9
How old is our Astronomy SE ?
From the site list:
At the end of the entry it indicates that the site is seven years and eleven months old.
Unlike other sites, why there is poor patronage despite having great reception in Astronomy ?
There are lots of ways to measure patronage. Astronomy actually has similar viewership to SE sites of comparable age. We ...
8
I saw a typical curve that successful SE sites follow for questions and visits. It starts with a big surge, then dives to a low point, and then gradually recovers until it reaches healthy levels.
Unsuccessful sites probably just keep going down until they hit near zero before they get closed.
So far, it looks like Astronomy could go either way. So go out ...
8
For posterity, I'd like to add something to RhysW's otherwise good answer:
Up-vote quality questions & answers - always.
I know "above k" users say that the rep-points doesn't count, but it does. Getting that first up-vote triggers the reward system even if you like it or not. Votes are feedback (in both positive and negative terms). This is true for ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible