text:
Synonym suggestion for [tag:tides]
Currently (as of February 12, 2021), the yet undefined tag tides has only 27 occurences, which compares to the tag tidal-forces with 78 occurences. I suggest, that make tides a synonym of tidal-forces since tides are always caused by tidal forces, and both tags are therefore very closely linked. Any thoughts? Did I overlook something?

@called2voyage If there is no objection from anybody, would you mind defining the synonym, please?

So far it only has two upvotes and one of them is me, so I'd rather wait until we have a little more concurrence.

@called2voyage I guess, I am in general not too patient (as you might have noticed), but I am trying to slow down a bit for a while even though it is hard. Thanks for your comment.

If it makes you feel better, Astronomy's tag hygiene is actually within normal ranges (unlike Space Exploration), so tag issues are not exactly an emergency. I do appreciate you being proactive though!

"Tides" are an earth science phenomenon. Tidal forces are an astrophysical one. Support the synonym

@JamesK planetary science: Does Saturn raise tides on Titan's lakes? and Do tides occur on planets like Neptune, having water? and even How high were the tides back when the Moon was much closer to Earth?

@called2voyage Do you think you could now (after some more comments and an answer) make tides a synonym of tidal-forces, please?

Merge complete!

I agree that tidal-forces concept is the driving force (literally) for ocean tides.
Bodies have solid-tides as well, so we should either have three tags or one.
I kind-of like the idea of having all three tags, but then what should we call the tides that the moons of gas giant planets induce in the gas? Or the tides produced in a star by a large companion (a close large planet or another stellar object)?
Hmmm...
Perhaps one tag for all is best, and I'll go along with tidal-forces as the tag's name.

Most of the tides questions would need to be retagged as tidal-forces instead; less than half are really about liquid tides, and note that while a few could have also been on-topic in Earth Science SE some really needed to be here, including

Does Saturn raise tides on Titan's lakes?
Do tides occur on planets like Neptune, having water?
How high were the tides back when the Moon was much closer to Earth?)

If all agree, I would start retagging once the synonym is created.

@B--rian does "I would" mean "somebody should" or "I will"?

I cannot define synonym (yet). Once I am one a non-mobile device and the synonym is created, I would start retagging, I meant.

Okay got it, thanks! You can consider pinging called2voyage under the question and ask if a sufficient "consensus threshold" has been achieved for it. But if the tags are merged then I don't know if re-tagging happens automatically or needs to be done manually. I still don't understand how tags work.

@B--rian my comment suggests "pinging called2voyage under the question" because if you do it there they will receive a notification of your comment. Since their username does not appear in comments under this answer (you probably had to type it manually, there was no autocomplete I'm guessing) then they will probably not receive a notification that you wrote a comment.here. From FAQ find How do comment @replies work?


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Can we merge tags "tno" and "trans-neptunian-object"?
trans-neptunian-object: Questions about objects orbiting the Sun with an average distance greater than that of Neptune. [24 questions]
tno: A Trans-Neptunian object is any minor planet in the Solar System that orbits the Sun at a greater average distance (semi-major axis) than Neptune [14 questions]
To me, both of them is essentially the same thing. Can we merge the tags?

Done! ..........

Status completed. Thank you called2voyage!

source: Stack Exchange

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

sort: votes


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Can we merge this two questions?
This question was asked on EarthScience.SE on January 15 which was later migrated to here 18 hours ago. On the same date, OP posted the same question here. Now, we flagged the migrated question as duplicate of the other. Can we merge the two questions so that only the answered question remains on the site?

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


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The tags for cosmic microwave background need merging
It seems like there are two tags referring to the cosmic microwave background, cmb and cosmic-microwave-background.
Should they be merged?

done! ..........


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What exactly are the tags [ebinary-star] and [tbinary-star]?
This question was recently edited to include a tag called tbinary-star, while the original binary-star was removed. Another question had its binary-star replaced by a tag called ebinary-star. What exactly are the purpose of these tags, and do we really need them?

I suspect tbinary was a typo for ebinary, and I think they are referring to eclipsing binaries. I think both tags should be replaced with eclipsing-star-systems.

Should we go ahead and remove them?

@fasterthanlight No, since I'm not certain I want to give more time for feedback.

The tag [eclipsing-star-systems] already exists

@JamesK Thanks for the heads up! I'll merge into that instead.

these both really look like typos by relatively inexperienced users. tbinary-star could be $T_{\text{binary star}}$ but even so that would not be a good tag. I think it's pretty safe to send them to the cornfield to join the rest of the erroneous tags.

@fasterthanlight Merges complete!


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Let's congratulate Connor Garcia on becoming our next moderator!
Congratulations!!!
Today, @ConnorGarcia was appointed as our next moderator!1 So I just want to give a huge shoutout to him for having courage to self-nominate and take on a task that requires much time and effort. Hopefully we can get out of beta soon! :)
1. I withdrew my nomination earlier, due to some minor issues.


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Post your pictures of the Great Conjunction here!
today and tomorrow are the times when Jupiter and Saturn are really close to each other (less than a tenth of a degree apart)!!! So I just want to reach out  to everyone for them to share their photos of the conjunction!
Parameters:

Specs for the camera (exposure time, time taken, etc)
Your photo! (duh!)

I think this question is a great idea. Sadly, it has been cloudy and/or foggy for the past week where I live

This year has been the first time my eyes aren't good enough to see Jupiter and Saturn as separate points of light - was really hoping for clear skies to take a photo tonight, but it's terrible weather here. I should have taken one last night - perfectly clear skies :-/

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.

Great photo! +1 I'm still waiting for my telescope to arrive xD

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-so-bad photos today.
You can see some color on Jupiter, three of its moons - four, maybe five "if you squint", as they say - and the rings of Saturn are pretty clear. I was able to see five of Jupiter's moons, I think, through my telescope, and one of Saturn's, but photos always degrade quality. This image is a composite of a couple different photos - I combined them in a pretty odd way, to say the least, and did some "cheating" with cropping and scaling. But, for less than an hour of trying to get photos, I'm satisfied with the result. Hopefully I can get some better stuff tomorrow and in the following days as well!
(For reference, this is using a Canon Rebel T3i, which is a nearly decade-old camera, and my eyepiece isn't phenomenal. I'm also using a 10" Dobsonian telescope for all of these photos. My exposure times on the various photos range from 1/600 seconds to 1/10 seconds, and my ISO ranges from 800 to 6400.)

Beautiful! But I'm confused how this photo was taken. Is this with the camera lens off and the image sensor at the primary focus of your Dobsonian reflecting telescope? If so, why is there chromatic aberration (red on the tops of everything, blue on the bottoms) and why say "and my eyepiece isn't phenomenal"?

Sorry, maybe I didn't clarify - I went through multiple attempts to get decent photos of the two. I tried taking my camera lens off and putting it right in front of my telescope eyepiece, putting it in front of just the telescope with no eyepiece, and then I tried with both my telescope eyepiece and my camera lens. That actually seemed to work. I aligned my telescope eyepiece and my camera lens, and that's how I took these images. I'm still a bit of a newbie to techniques like these, so I'm going to do some more research and experimentation when I have the chance.

I also had to degrade the quality of the image to post to the site, since there's a size limit, just FYI.

oh I see, got it. Thanks!

Not in the spirit of the question - but I received this Christmas e-card from the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes (I am a regular observer there). Taken at the prime focus of the 4.2-m William Herschel Telescope on 21 December 2020. The WHT has recently been fitted with a new prime focus field corrector, giving it a massive 2 degree field of view (in preparation for the WEAVE wide-field multi-fibre spectrograph this year). The picture is a colour-composite taken through red, green and blue filters with a CMOS camera. No idea what the exposure time is - probably very short!

This was taken from my telescope (twinstar, 150mm x 1400mm) with my samsung smartphone (handheld, just in case).
PS Why is it so difficult to get the phone to take sharper pictures with the telescope? Not that it was NASA-sharp, but it was sharper, nevertheless.

Beautiful photo and great question at the end. I think you can post a new question in the main site here in Astronomy SE or in Photography SE and include this entire post almost as-is with a good title like "How to control/improve my focus and exposure when doing smart phone + telescope astrophotography?" I think the answers might begin with "Download a simple photography app for your phone". For some phones there are even free apps that allow you to access more powerful controls over focus and exposure so you don't have to rely on the phones automatic settings.

Jupiter's moons look to be very nicely in focus considering astronomical seeing. I don't know if it would have worked in this case, but the first thing I would have done is to zoom in as much as possible so that Jupiter was large, then touched the screen there to try to convince the phone that Jupiter is the region of interest. It might or might not have then focused on it a little better and probably would have lowered the exposure.

In this image it seems that the phone exposed long enough to make the background gray and figured the planets were just bright streetlights and therefore overexposure wasn't an issue. If your phone has it, you can also try turning on HDR

Here is my photo:
Specs:

Camera: iPhone 12
Exposure: 4 seconds
Time taken: 5:37 PM EST (UTC-05), 12/20/2020
ISO: 350

This is neither a photo nor created by me, but the Google Doodle for the Great conjunction is the cutest thing I've seen in a while (except for Baby Yoda/Grogu):

(Source)

 If this isn't appropriate here, just tell me or simply remove this answer

I think that once in every 800 years an answer like this is okay :-)

iPhone 6
Color Space: sRGB
Exposure Time: 1/15
FNumber: 2.2
Focal Length: 4.15
Focal Length In 35mm Film: 29
ISO Speed Ratings: 1,600

TIME: 2020-12-17 17:51:53 UTC+8

From UTC+8 I could get the Moon parallel to the pair of planets together with a local character who is particularly fond of crescent moons.

Click for full size. 2nd screen shot from 《OPEN！OPEN！》超大預告第二彈！ See also IMDB OPEN! OPEN! and Wikipedia's "OPEN Jian"


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Will accounts and reputation points be kept after becoming a public beta?
I've never participated in any Stack Exchange private betas before so I'm curious what happens with the site when we leave private beta?
I think, questions won't be deleted. Or are they? What about accounts and their associated data (badges, reputation, e.t.c.)?

Hold on to your hats and brace for impact! :)
To add to @RhysW explanation, on top of requirements to reach site-wide privileges changing, the most notable change is Stack Exchange wide visibility. Well, visibility of the website in general, but you should expect the greatest influx of new members coming from those already active on other Stack Exchange sites. At least during the initial public beta period. This is mostly good, but some caution is also advised.
It is good from the perspective that many of these new members would have already had learned the Stack Exchange ropes and might require less attention in that respect, they might even help out in comments and chats other, less experienced users.
At the same time, you'll be exposed to presumed levels of on other Stack Exchange site's quality of questions and answers, so if you're after improving your Q&A quality, you might want to have the best example Q&A ready and waiting for the wider SE audience review, serve as an example of what you'd like to achieve.
There will also inevitably be first few weeks of the public beta with not enough community's own reviewers (due to higher reputation requirements, but also for being more active on a generally more vibrant website), so control of this newly incoming populace will be somewhat impaired.
Expect more arguments, good and bad critique, and this meta to really become lively. First few weeks of the public beta will really be the make or break period, with some that won't be prepared for these changes giving up, and some enjoying it even more so. It's a challenge, however you wanna spin it, and some will be more up to it than others. I like to think of it as shedding the baby feathers period:

Godspeed Astronomy Stack Exchange!

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/


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Please, use capitalisation of proper nouns
This is my request for everyone to use capitalisation for proper nouns. I've seen it misused in many questions and their respective answers on our main Q&A and they often cause problems with understanding the nature of the question. I won't list any examples not wanting to explicitly point out any of those that did, but a short browsing through the list of the questions should prove me right easily.
Why is this so important in astronomy? Because this is the spelling differentiation between a galaxy and the Galaxy, a solar system and the Solar system, a sun and the Sun, a moon and the Moon. There is even a whole Wikipedia page about it, and the Internet is otherwise rather filled with similar posts describing the difference between them.
For example, if you mention in your question "Why does galaxy rotate?", we have no way of knowing if you're asking about a galaxy, i.e. galaxies in general, or the Galaxy, our very own Milky Way (yes, the Galaxy is a perfectly correct term for it). Answers for it might be different for whichever might be you're inquiring about. And same goes for spelling and grammar rules in answers. We need to know what you meant, so please be precise and state so with the use of determiner the and capitalisation of proper nouns and common nouns derived from proper nouns.
Quoting from Curious About Astronomy post on What are the names of the earth, moon, sun, and solar system?:

The name of our planet is the Earth. The name of our moon is the Moon.
  The name of our solar system is the Solar System.
Notice that I capitalize them, because when used as names, they are
  proper nouns. This also helps us distinguish between the planet Earth
  and earth (meaning soil), between the Earth's Moon and moon (meaning
  the natural satellite of a planet), and between our Solar System and
  any other solar systems (since any system containing a star and a
  planet or a planet-forming disk can be called a solar system.)

I would also ask of all of you to edit your own contributions if they suffer this inconsistency, suggest edits to any such user contributions you feel confident you know what their authors meant, or if that is unclear, request from their respective authors to clarify what they're inquiring about in their questions or writing to explain in their answers.
Feel free to chip in with your take on all of this in the answers below. Thanks!

a universe, our Universe

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/


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Can I ask about earth-like planets?
I have seen that there are no views for my question about earth-like planets. So I wanted to ask here on meta that whether I can ask question about this or not.
Earth-like is absolutely astronomy, is it on-topic?

Sure - I think it's on topic. There are definitely biological elements to this discussion. Things like "What is the definition of life?", "What range of conditions are conducive for life?", probably fall into that category more so than  astronomy. But given then successes of the Kepler mission (Kepler|NASA), detecting exo-solar planetary systems and the study of their atmospheres is absolutely something that the astronomical community is focusing their attention on.

I think that there are not problems, if the question is clear

I think you are talking about How do a scientist say that he found an earth like planet.  That question is not at all clear to me since it seems to be asking about biology:

My question is, if there are mountains and other similar objects on an earthlike planet, do scientists have an image of life there? Because even plants are living objects. Don't they count plants as living ones?
I was shocked to come to know that scientists call plants living organisms and have included them in a separate Kingdom Planta but when they show a planet, they show a greenish circle, but say there is no life there! Plants can be included in living organisms.

We seem to be missing a fair amount of context here.  You mention "a scientist" but you don't say who.  Overall, the question doesn't come off as very well thought out, so it's very difficult to provide a useful answer.  I previously put it on hold so that you would have an opportunity to edit it before getting more downvotes or unhelpful answers.

But to answer your question: Earthlike planets are certainly ontopic.


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Why are no other Stack Exchange sites listed when voting to close a Q as off-topic?
When endeavouring to recommend the closure of a question relating to a python programming problem, the only other site available for selection as more appropriate was this meta site. Is there no way to select one to add it in? Or at least could some common sites be added to the list, if it is static - eg space exploration, physics, stackoverflow, etc?
Images of series of screens:

I think only mods can migrate questions to other sites.

Not what I am asking.

Currently we do not allow automatic migration of content to beta sites. Moving questions to or from a site whose scope is still evolving can be somewhat problematic; even worse if the destination site were to be later closed.
So early in a site's development, we prefer migrations to be a bit more hands-on. If you see a question that needs migrating, you should flag it for moderator attention.

That isn't answering the question. I'm not asking that I be able to transfer it, just that I suggest that it belongs on a specific other site. I can do this for meta, but not for any others, and few questions are meta questions

@Jeremy I don't see how this does not answer your question. Typically closing a question because it belongs somewhere else will move that question automatically. When sites are in beta, we do not allow that to happen. So under the close reason "this question belongs on another site", there are no other sites listed because we do not set up those migration paths during beta. You can only say for sure that a question is off topic for your site (the first option).

Because following this series of actions does NOT close the question it just RECOMMENDS the question for closure. If it works correctly, a vote will be added to the close button, the moderators will see it and be able to review it, and others can add their votes. But it is completely pointless to have an option saying it doesn't belong here, it belongs on another stack exchange site, if no other sites are listed! Once again, I'm not asking to be able to automatically move it to another site, I just want to do what the steps suggest I ought to be able to do - suggest it should be elsewhere

That's where you are wrong. It doesn't recommend it for closure, your vote is effective. It only takes five votes (none of them have to be mods) to close it. I don't see why we can't have this as part of flagging as opposed to close votes, though.


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How to go from chat to private discussion?
If two people are having a conversation in chat and wish to jump to a private discussion (e.g. because they wish to discuss stuff outside the Astronomy Stack Exchange guidelines or because they are discussing sensitive, restricted, confidential or private information) then how could they do this?
I am thinking about solutions that might be:-
(a) Either within the site or by going "off-site"
(b) Either with continued anonymity or with revealing identities.

If the conversation is literally "sensitive, restricted, confidential or private information", then off-site is really your only option (i.e. everything we do is designed to be public, by design).
But if your goal is simply to create a quieter, one-on-one environment for a more-focused conversation with a specific user (away from the mainstay of the room), you can click the user you wish to speak to and select 'start a new room with this user'.
That feature does not create a private chat room (fully visible, Google indexed, etc), but it can be a useful way to pull someone aside "into the hall" where you can discuss an issue one-on-one without interfering with the conversation flow of a much larger room.
I hope that helps.

Thanks, that helps.  I still would like to know if there is a simple method of meeting up off-site that does not require public disclosure of email addresses. I dont expect such a method to be provided by Stack Exchange.


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What's up with this serial upvoting?
There was a user who appears to have recently benefited from serial upvoting - gaining about 200 rep within the space of three minutes. I checked the user's rep chart, and it shows that there was, at one point later on, "-50 - serial upvoting reversed."
I don't think that only 5 upvotes (for they were all on answers) were part of the serial upvoting, yet only 5 were reversed. What's up with this? If there appears to be serial upvoting on a large number of questions, why has only part of it been reversed?

Hard to say. AFAIK they don't really say how serial up/downvoting is qualified/quantified by the automated system, to discourage people from trying to find ways around it.

It is not really appropriate for moderators to comment on these things. If you believe that there is serial upvoting or downvoting, you should flag an affected question or answer, contract a moderator, or contact a community manager.
The only other help I can offer is the help page on serial voting reversal:
https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/help/serial-voting-reversed

Thanks for this advice. I did flag one of the affected questions for moderator attention; I'll see what happens.

Also, checking the user's rep, the serial upvoting appears to have been thoroughly addressed by the mods.


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My comment is 20 characters but is less than 15?
I'm trying to post a comment that is 20 characters long, but "Comments must be at least 15 characters in length." Is this a bug?

I've refreshed it - even tried a different comment. Still no go. I can ask comments elsewhere on the site though...

@Undo It was "@Undo Wow, thanks :D"

If you start a comment with @<original poster>, we strip that out (if there are no other people commenting on the post), as the original poster will already be notified of comments to their posts. So, 20 - 6 == 14...

This is likely due to the SE software trying to be smart and helpful for you. If you're leaving a comment under Undo's post, and it would be that post's first comment — or, more accurately, the first one not posted by Undo or yourself — the system will assume that the comment is directed at Undo. Once it makes that decision, it'll figure that it can safely strip the "@Undo" out of the text of your comment. Finally, after that text is gone, it will count the number of characters you're trying to submit.
Most of the time, this reduces clutter and improves readability, but in cases like yours, it can be a bit confusing.


text:
Some buttons aren't working on mobile
Certain features on the site don't seem to work on mobile (I'm using a Samsung Galaxy S4, chrome browser).
I can't open my notifications dropdown (the dropdown when there is new activity on my questions).
Also I can't seem to do upvotes or down votes.
Thought I should bring this up in case the site moderators were not aware.

I should add, they work fine on Stack Overflow, just not on Astronomy stack.

This has little to do with site moderators as you mention in your question. It is a matter of website development that isn't in the hands of moderators, all they can do is forward it to those that can do something about it. But if it's only related to this particular website, then I should mention that developers do read metas of sites for bug reports, like your question is tagged with, so no migration to [meta.se] is needed, unless it actually repeats on all [se] websites.


text:
2019: a year in moderation
It's New Year's Day in Stack Exchange land...
A distinguishing characteristic of these sites is how they are moderated:

We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.
  -- A Theory of Moderation

While there certainly are Moderators here, a significant amount of the moderation is done by ordinary people, using the privileges
they've earned by virtue of their contributions to the site. Each of you contributes a little bit of time and effort, and together you accomplish much.
As we enter a new year, let's pause and reflect, taking a moment to appreciate the work that we do here together.
And what could be more festive than a big pile of numbers?
So here is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on Astronomy over the past 12 months:
                  Action                  Moderators Community¹
----------------------------------------- ---------- ----------
Users suspended²                                  17         10
Users destroyed³                                  14          0
Users deleted                                      7          0
Users contacted                                   25          0
Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue             16        748
Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue                 0        257
Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue           1        611
Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue                 0        224
Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue                  0      1,200
Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue                 4      1,540
Tags merged                                        6          0
Tag synonyms proposed                              4          0
Tag synonyms created                               4          0
Questions unprotected                              0          3
Questions reopened                                13          3
Questions protected                                3         34
Questions migrated                                21          0
Questions merged                                   3          0
Questions flagged⁵                                 7      1,047
Questions closed                                  65        314
Question flags handled⁵                          125        926
Posts unlocked                                     0          4
Posts undeleted                                   15         35
Posts locked                                       3        189
Posts deleted⁶                                   251        728
Posts bumped                                       0        107
Escalations to the Community Manager team          4          0
Comments undeleted                                 6          0
Comments flagged                                   9        447
Comments deleted⁷                                635      1,151
Comment flags handled                            250        205
Answers flagged                                   10        664
Answer flags handled                             503        167
All comments on a post moved to chat              14          0

Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Astronomy without diamonds next to their names, and to the automated systems otherwise known as user #-1.
² The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.
³ A "destroyed" user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.
⁴ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.
⁵ Includes close flags (but not close or reopen votes).
⁶ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.
⁷ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).
Further reading:

Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? I posted a similar report here last year: 2018: a year in moderation...
You can also check out this report on other sites
Or peruse detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites

Wishing you all a happy new year...

Looks like we've had a significant decline in community flagged questions. I wonder what the reason for that is. Do we truly have less flag-worthy issues or are less people reporting?


text:
Why can't I click on the up/down vote counter to see how the breakdown looks?
In other Stack Exchanges, when I click on the summary vote count it resolves into how many upvotes vs downvotes.  This doesn't work in Astronomy.  Is this something that is disabled for this SE?

Clicking on the counter to see the breakdown is an ability that you get at a higher rep level. If you check out your privileges page, you will see that you get that ability at 750 rep.

Ah.  Wonder why that is such an important ability that one has to wait for it?  I never noticed this before, because it wasn't until a couple of months ago that I discovered this functionality (on StackOverflow where my rep is almost 4000).

Anecdotally, @Cyberherbalist, this is the most-missed feature for people who start up a new site.  The primary reason its not given at lower reputations is that it requires an extra (and expensive) database query.  If you really miss seeing vote splits, you could install this script to work around it.

That's cool, @JonEricson.  Some smart person came up with that, clearly.  But I'm not that keen on it - it just puzzled me and I thought there was something goofy that might need fixing.


text:
What is happened to the site in the second half of 2017?
Using this statistics on the site, we can see the following history of the open, closed or deleted questions of the site, per month:

What we can see, is a slow, roughly linear expansion, which is the typical behavior of most smaller beta SE sites working actively on its graduation.
However, this tendency was broken, roughly in the second half of 2017. Then, the count of the new questions got a huge increase, but also the count of the closed/deleted questions with it. This is highly atypical. The result is that the count of the questions who survived the reviews, didn't grow significantly.
My impression is that from somewhere you got a gift, i.e. a large mass of content, questions, newcomers, and you rejected it. I am not sure if it was a wise decision, if your goal is to make your site successful.
What is happened?

The Great American Eclipse on August 21, 2017

Anyway, I feel this site is successful enough. Why do you think it's not successful? Because bad questions are closed? (some of them are also closed as dupes, and not deleted)

More questions also means more poor questions, and questions in need of improvement. This is especially true when folks visit the site for the first time, and may not be aware of site standards. The August eclipse likely brought many first-time users to the site, which in turn caused our question rate to rise, as well as the number of questions we had to close for not meeting those standards. I'd bet that the kilonova observed that month - and announced in October - is partially responsible for the second peak.

I have access to the mod statistics. There was no large peak in 2017, not relative to months prior or since.

@called2voyage This is a very simple query, with minimal SQL knowledge anybody can see, what it shows is what I say. I don't know the mod stat page, so I can only estimate a possible cause of the difference: maybe this mod stat includes only the not deleted posts.

@HDE226868 I think a good working site has a pyramid structure, where everybody does what they can. I think the border of the overmoderation is roughly where the moderation causes stat decrease. Some regression analysis I did (and did not include here) shows that the moderation is not on this level, yet. However, I suspected at least a missed opportunity, and I think the community should have known about that (and also I was curious, what is happened).

@AndrewT. Yes, it is successful (at least matching a parabola to the logarithm of the questions/month stat by least squares has a positive quadratic member). I will include also that stat, after I could get back to my SEDE account :-)

@peterh It is possible the mod statistics automatically corrects for spam.

I'm quite sure this is 100% caused by spam posts. If you compare your graph with the one from the metasmoke dashboard, you'll see that the spam wave started in July 2017 (before that, Astronomy didn't see any spam at all) and has diminished (but didn't extinguish) since March 2018.

It's possible to exclude posts which received spam flags from the statistics, but it'll require rewriting the query.

The count of the spams roughly matches the count of the deleted posts, I think it is enough to assume that their deletion was initiated mainly by the spam detector. Tyvm!


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2017 Self-evaluation
It's been a couple of years since we did an automated self-evaluation and it seemed like a good time to look critically at this site again. (I hadn't thought of it until I gathered the questions, but the recent eclipse must have brought in more visitors in the last few months.) We aren't doing automated evaluations anymore, but we still think introspection is a good idea.
Below, I've listed 5 questions chosen at random from the last quarter that have received at least some anonymous feedback.  I also included two scores*:

How helpful the page seemed to regular users.
How helpful the page seemed to anonymous visitors.

The range is from 0 to 100% where bigger numbers mean more helpful than small numbers. The final number is the number of total views the question had received at the time of sampling.
If you'd like to participate, please copy the question list into an answer for evaluation. Exactly how you evaluate the questions and answers is up to you, but it would be useful to:

Find better answers on the internet (if they exist).
Exactly what "better" means is up to you, but the criteria might include:

correctness,
understandability,
authoritative (e.g. citing official sources),
clean formatting, or
easier to find with a search.

Figure out why regular users and anonymous visitors have different opinions of the usefulness of the page.
The most common reason for low visitor scores is low views, which limits the number of anonymous users who provide feedback. It's not a problem if some questions are so niche that nobody outside of the community reads them. But chance visitors who find answers via search are the best source of new contributors.
More interesting: sometimes visitors disagree with the site's community about the usefulness of a question and its answers. Obviously we can't know why people who can't leave comments might differ from current users, but we can make an educated guess.
Fix any problems you notice and describe your changes.
After doing the above analysis, you will be in good shape to edit titles and tags to help Google direct searchers to the question, clean up formatting and grammar problems, and link to authoritative sources. There's no need to wait; go edit.

The goal is to use the sample to reflect on how the site is progressing in terms of "making the internet a better place for people to get answers to their astronomy questions". If this site already does a good job, that's wonderful. If there are some things that need fixing, please talk about that. In either case, this evaluation mostly stands to improve this community's understanding of itself.

Key: link (registered voters; anonymous voters; views)

Is the sun any brighter during a solar eclipse (76%; 33%; 74,180)
What exactly is the "paradox" in Olber's Paradox? (91%; 73%; 3,064)
What does a solar eclipse at 99% totality look like? (72%; 15%; 8,449)
Why are nearby stars like Proxima Centauri and Barnard's star not visible to the naked eye? (86%; 65%; 2,985)
Why are three year old eclipse glasses not recommended? (57%; 18%; 868)

Footnote:
* The scores are actually the lower bound of Wilson score confidence interval for a Bernoulli parameter, which is a measure of how likely a given set of upvotes and downvotes is overall positive. For the first score, I used the sum of all votes on the question and all answers. For the second score, I used anonymous feedback. Please see the query I used for implementation details.

I've started in on this, albeit two months late, and I've finished going through one or two questions. I'll add to this list when I have more to say.

What does a solar eclipse at 99% totality look like? (72%; 15%; 8,449)
This is one of a number of questions about eclipses we received around the time of the total solar eclipse earlier this year. Three of the five questions on this evaluation are eclipse-related, and two have very high views. This is almost certainly because of the accessibility of the phenomenon. People can go out and see a major astronomical event with their own eyes, and it takes no technical knowledge to understand what's going on. That said, there is a lot of information on the Internet (some good, some bad) about solar eclipses, so it might be hard for this question to stand out.
The first thing I noticed is that none of the answers included images, say from previous eclipses. This would have been immensely helpful. Words don't do justice when someone's asking what something looks like. A simulation linked in one of the answers was helpful, but there's no actual image information contained in the post body. We're still directing people elsewhere to get a better idea of what the eclipse would look like at 99% totality.
There are certainly plenty of places online that show either comparisons of an eclipse at different locations, or a series of photographs taken at one spot during different times of an eclipse (including totality and the periods leading up to it).

The Washington Post compared simulated views from a number of cities including St. Louis (observing about 99% coverage) and Charleston (experiencing a total solar eclipse). The comparisons in particular help. Many news outlets have similar articles.
Many educational institutions (e.g. here, as well as some of NASA's pages) show images at different points in an eclipse, which give possibly the best idea of what the shape of coverage looks like.

So, I do think we fall short in actually showing people what a 99% eclipse would look like, which is arguably the most important thing to cover. That could account for the 15% score. Maybe an answer with images from the 2017 eclipse would come in handy, especially from someone who was there to take them.


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Do you want to write for our blog?
About a month ago, I set forth the idea for an unofficial blog for Astronomy Stack Exchange. It's garnered some support so far for the idea, but we need to know that people are actually willing to contribute content to it. I don't know what we can put out, but maybe a post a week might be sustainable. If we were to get, say, four or five people working on it, then one post per person per month would be all that's needed.
If you think you'll be able to contribute, please write an answer below, ideally listing

What topics you think you might want to write about.
A conservative estimate of how often you might be able to write. Don't feel pressured to commit to anything yet.
Anything else you feel is relevant.

It's also fine if you don't write an answer and later end up contributing, but if you do think you'll contribute - well, that would be useful data.
I'll leave this featured for a week or so, then see where we're at.

@called2voyage It seems like we could maybe have one post every two weeks with the people we have so far. That seems not too bad, and hopefully not much of a burden on anyone. If things start rolling, we might be able to attract more writers - that's what's happened for Worldbuilding, at least. It could go in different ways.

@HDE226868 I'm not so blog-literate; is it possible to describe range of word-lengths that's envisioned? How will the mechanics be similar or different than posting in SE? Will there be MathJax support? 2MB limits on images and animated GIFs? Do we write with markdown, html, google docs? Thanks!

@uhoh If we go with Medium, they have some details here. Essentially, for each post in a publication, you write a draft and submit it to the publication; an editor (so 1-2 people from our community) approves it and makes it public. There's basic markdown support, but no MathJax - and more info on the site. Finally, I'm imagining posts of 500-2000 words, but it does depend on the person who's writing it.

I see, thanks for the quick reply, wow I've never written without having an equation editor handy, sounds like it will be a real challenge for me. I've just read How to write mathematics on Medium and the answer is unicode or images. At least they support code blocks.

@uhoh It looks like Wordpress may have built-in LaTeX support in their free hosting solution! https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/a/15636

@uhoh It does render it as an image though, so it is similar to using one of the mathjax or LaTeX to image sites, but you wouldn't have to use an external resource.

@uhoh I'm actually pretty happy with the Wordpress implementation. It defaults to math mode. Wordpress keeps your LaTeX markup in the edit mode--you don't lose it after publishing. And, then of course, as I mentioned they put the markup in the alt text of the rendered image, which is good for accessibility!

I would be willing to write about exoplanets, stellar imaging, and planetary formation. Most of what I would write would be derivative (I would read papers and compile/summarize), but I would provide a little perspective from my point of view as an aerospace software engineer and long-time astronomy fan.
I could probably only write maybe every few months, or maybe every other month.

I might be able to write occasionally (a couple times a month if I'm lucky - when I have time I can write a lot but I generally swing between calmer and busier periods of time as tests come up in school or some such - but I can probably write a minimum of once a month).
While I'm not very active on astronomy, I am quite interested in it and already write on the Worldbuilding blog, mostly on science-y topics. For the astronomy blog, I could write a bit about planetary geology, a topic I'm currently interested in, and occasionally on interesting objects I've found (recently, for example, I've been reading about 'Oumuamua). I've already written one piece on the worldbuilding blog that's relevant to astronomy (on Boltzmann brains and entropy - a little more cosmology focused, perhaps) that I could revisit.
Disclaimer: I am most certainly not an expert; I am a highschool student.

I can help with supernova related topics, machine learning in astronomy, and some other basic stuff. Once every two-three months seems possible for me.

If there's a possibility you can write a blog post for March or a subsequent month, please drop by chat.

Or if you can't make chat for some reason, let me know and if there's still an opening for March we could work something out. You can also let me know months after March you'd be willing to write for, if you know this far in advance.

I think I could contribute about a post per month, at least for the foreseeable future (after that, maybe more). I might write some posts the way called2voyage mentioned - deconstructing and analyzing papers - but I think I could also talk a bit about astronomy research from an undergrad's perspective (I'm not sure how interesting that could be; we'll see). The main subjects I'd like to write about would be massive stars and topics related to pulsar timing, but I could also diversify a bit. An astronomy seminar I'm taking in the spring on stars might lead to interesting material.

While I'm not an expert in anything, I can write things on several topics that are at least mostly not wrong. I could perhaps write something once a month, but it's hard to say without understanding what the process is. Is there a proposal step first, a review of on-topic-ness and quality, or is it more like SE where we just open a window, type into it, and push Post your blogpost?
If it's possible to find some posts that can be thought of as examples of the quality, length, and style imagined (content of examples not so relevant) it would be easier to gauge.

@called2voyage I've removed the MathJax comment, maybe clean up comments? Also, re the last sentence, I still don't understand things like length and content, do we submit proposals? Or are there invitations? Do you need something soon? Or should I just wait for a few posts to appear to see first hand what it's like?

@uhoh No hard limits on length or content at this point. If you're interested, we'll add you as a contributor at the blog and look over what you type up before publishing it. Yes, we do have to invite you, but in theory open to anyone who is interested--but no guarantee of publication. We don't need anything soon.
As before, if you want to wait until some posts are up before deciding, that's fine too.

@called2voyage okay then let's wait a bit; thanks.

I could maybe write for your blog, covering gravity and cosmological subjects. I did some blogging a few years back for James Delingpole. See stuff like this:
https://bogpaper.wordpress.com/2013/11/03/science-on-sunday-with-john-duffield-dark-matter/
More recently I've been writing a blog of my own, see http://physicsdetective.com/. I could maybe do some cut-down simplified versions of some of the articles I've already written. Or some new  articles. It might be an idea if you came up with a list of articles and asked different people to write them.


text:
Do we want to change the link about MathJax help?
Astronomy Stack Exchange has MathJax enabled, allowing us to use LaTeX to write equations. Like other SE sites with MathJax, we have a section in the editing help page on how to use LaTeX. This section contains a "MathJax help" link at the end.
By default, the link points to this page, but it turns the Community Team can change it to a different page, such as a post on our site's meta with a customized explanation of MathJax, or this comprehensive meta post on Math Stack Exchange.
In case folks want to change the link, we decided to start a meta discussion. If you have an idea for a page to link to, post it as an answer below. If there's a consensus about a specific option, the Community Team can make the change.

I prefer the link to the Mathematics Meta SE page.
Firstly it is explicitly specific to Mathjax and does not rely or seem to relate to Latex.  Mathjax and LaTex are similar but should not be considered the same.  Latex is for document production and much of it's documentation is just confusing for people using Mathjax.  It is also common to see LaTex users solve formatting problems by using external libraries which are not available to Mathjax users who need Mathjax specific methods.
Secondly it's a very comprehensive list of hints and tricks that makes it relatively easy for newer users to find out what they need than a simpler and less detailed account provides.  There's always going to be a learning curve, but that page gets you to what you need fairly directly without fuss.
Lastly the Mathematics Meta help page for Mathjax is updated reasonably frequently so I think we can reasonably say it is keeping up with changes specific to SE and not some other site's Mathjax reference version, which may not equate to what SE uses.  For that reason alone I think the Mathematic SE help page should be the default for all SE sites using Mathjax and I am surprised to find a Tex help page being used instead, but that's a subject for the main Meta SE site not here.

The "MathJax help" link on Astronomy.SE (and this Meta site) has been changed to point to this Math Meta post, per your suggestion. Let us know if you encounter any problems!


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Should the hubble-telescope and hst tags be merged?
Should hubble-telescope and hst be merged?
It looks like I may be the culprit here, I only see three hst questions and they're all mine.

This is a simple enough request, so I've gone ahead and performed the merge; I can't think of a reason not to. In the process, I also created a synonym mapping hst to hubble-telescope. If we see something like hubble-space-telescope arise, I can merge that, if need be. But for now it looks like we're all good.

Thank you for your speedy and thorough attention!


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Regarding the state of our chat room
Our chat room, the Observatory, has existed for almost 10 years, yet it doesn't have many messages in it. On average these days, one message is posted every week, mainly regarding interesting ramblings in the science world and links to other questions.
Our chat room needs more love, but what can we (and the rest of the community) do to keep our chat room alive (and not sputtering with random, intermittent messages)?

All it takes is interest really. Unfortunately our userbase hasn't really had interest in a long time, but there hadn't been any interest in meta for a while either and it's picked back up, so you never know!

@called2voyage If only moderators could add in "site-exclusive" badges... Participation in chat would be a big one...

There already are badges for that: Talkative and Outspoken.

@called2voyage Yes, but these don't really provide a valuable incentive for users (there could be more)

If you have ideas for more you could always propose them on MSE. They may be useful to more than just Astro.

But I'm not really sure badges are actually helpful in this case. Of the two we have, only 25 have earned the bronze one and just a handful have earned the silver one.

My biggest problem is that I did keep forgetting how to find the chat - I knew it existed whenever the discussions in comments gets lengthy, but the link directing there is not too prominent nor intuitive.

There's a chat room? Who knew?!

When it comes to chat, I think it's best to keep to an organic "If you build it, they will come"$^{\dagger}$ type of approach. It was always meant to be a third place, but not everyone wants or needs that - and that's fine! I personally don't use the Observatory that often because my day is centered around astronomy, and when I have free time - well, I'm usually using that free time to do something totally unrelated. Given that we have a number of full-time astronomers among the most active users, I wouldn't be surprised if others feel the same way.
Participation in chat doesn't necessarily lead to community growth; rather, I'd argue that it's instead a byproduct of that. A bigger userbase means more folks who might be interested in using chat. Therefore, I think that it's not worth trying to artificially stimulate chat room usage. If there were issues with the culture of the chat room - violations of SE rules, rude language, unwelcoming attitudes, etc. - well, that would probably warrant a thorough meta discussion. But that's definitely not the case.

$^{\dagger}$I know it's actually "he", not "they", but . . . eh.

Definitely agree

I concur with @HDE226868's answer and will add the following observation.
There are several high quality science/math/tech SE sites with excellent, mature and active user communities and yet nearly zero activity in their general chat rooms.
Chat is for "disposable" discussion, it scrolls off, is hard to search, and is generally forgotten. It really is a place to chat and if users aren't the chatty type or have found much better places to chat, then the room will naturally be quiet.

Our chat room needs more love,

As I see it there is no problem to be addressed, if love is needed it's in maintaining tags, answering questions, being kind and helpful to new users, giving them advice and sometimes just editing their posts rather than insta-closing them.

I am happy to have matter-based discussion as (semi-persistents) comments, and not in a somewhat hidden chat room. But that's just my view.


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Astronomy Stack Exchange 10-year anniversary!
Astronomy Stack Exchange will turn ten years old on September 24th!
The first question asked on our site was:
How do I calculate the inclination of an object with an amateur telescope?
Over eight years later, we finally graduated as a full site: Graduation of the Astronomy Stack Exchange
Like most of us, this site has both satisfied and piqued my curiosity about the universe around us (sometimes in the same question)!
To celebrate our tenth anniversary, the community managers and moderators of Astronomy Stack Exchange encourage you to share your favorite posts on the site.  What's special about ASE to you? What prompted you to first ask a question or answer one? Do you have any funny or stories from your time on the site?
Feel free to reply with your best moments spent here with the community!
Thanks to all of you for making ASE so special. Congrats on our ten-year anniversary!

I'm so glad we've made it this far. This community has really grown.

Personal thanks!
I was an Astronomy & Astrophysics undergraduate (a million years ago) but due to sudden large budget cuts near the end of my program (during a global economic malaise) the observatory was closed and most of the faculty dispersed (one to oil exploration via gravitational effects on satellites, another to work on national energy conservation; it was ugly).
Life is about choices - I moved to a different field for graduate studies and so ended my dream.
I am so happy this site exists - it allows me to rub elbows with actual astronomers and folks who may not be but know much more than I do. It keeps me thinking and reading and dreaming.
For the community
Astronomy SE continues to be a magnet for amateurs and young-at-heart folks who like to look up, as well as students who will actualize their plans to become astronomers.
It obviously also does the heavy lifting of providing answers for people doing astronomy but getting stuck at some point, be it software problems or some bit of astrophysical insight.
What a wonderful site - happy birthday!

nice :-) I, similarly, had a place to study physics with astrophysics at university, but money concerns meant I couldn't go, and have had a career in computer programming instead. I never lost my love for astronomy, though

I was a high schooler when I first joined Astronomy Stack Exchange, just over nine years ago. The time has flown by almost uncomfortably quickly; I'm now less than two years away from finishing my PhD. Obviously, many different people, events and opportunities have helped me along, but this site has been a part of that journey, too. In the beginning, it stimulated my imagination; right now, it keeps me thinking about topics outside my narrow area of research, and it gives me a chance to teach others about some of the things I find most interesting about the universe.
So thank you to everyone who's been a part of this community along the way. You've helped me along the path I'm on today, and I'm sure there are plenty of others who can say the same.

Happy Birthday Astronomy!!!
Now, I am in fact no experienced user to this site, nor to StackExchange/StackOverflow, so most everyone will never have heard or seen me before, but I always kept Astronomy as a sort of side-hobby that I look up, research and enjoy Astronomy questions! I am very new to astronomy still but this site has helped a lot!
Special shout-out to @uhoh for consistently making well-written and well-received questions for the community! Not to mention all the bounties that @uhoh has made to encourage me to learn more!
As a tribute to Astronomy SE, I am dedicating (hopefully) more of my time to Astronomy. I can't wait to learn more! <3
Favourite Answer (still looking) - @uhoh - Why does the alignment evaluation image from JWST look like this


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Where should I expound my theories?
From what I'm understanding, StackExchange is a Question-and-Answer-Only website!
It's NOT for any discussions or hypothesize or whatsoever!
But then, where should I go if I got some theories I like to share with everybody else!?
Immature theories might it be, but it may trigger brighter minds to discover new possibilities!
So, if you guys could be so kind and refer me to a website as creditable as StackExchange where I could share my hypothesis and theories.

Why do you need a website?   Couldn't you mail your theories direct to the university of your choice?   Have you taken any university classes in your subject?  Discussed with professors?

The correct answer is: Don't.  Until you've established some bona fides in your field of research, anything you publish as "my theories" will quite rightfully be ignored as crackpot science.

You can create a blog, post on twitter or even join a university, spend 7 years studying and learn how science is done.
But what if you want to post here?  I propose three tests

Can the "theory" be broken down into small chunks that can be asked about?
Can the question chunks be answered?
Are you willing to change your mind?

If it fails the first, it is too broad.
If it fails the second it is primarily opinion based.
If it fails the third it is a rant, not a genuine inquiry.

For example:

I think the universe is powered by electricity, what do you think guys?

Is not an acceptable question It is unclear, too broad, and posed as a discussion point.
Also unacceptable is:

Could gravity be a form of magnetism?

(It is unclear what that question means.)  However, questions that may be posed by Electric Universe theories can be asked:

What causes the temperature of the sun's atmosphere to increase away from the photosphere and not follow an "inverse square law"?

Is perfectly ok, providing you are happy to accept that there is now a good explanation for this and can accept that this is no proof that the sun in powered by an invisible arc of electric plasma.

Excellent question.
For some reason, Stack Exchange - or at least, those running it - allow only a very small sliver of thought. If anybody comes and says anything that goes against their theories, that person will be immediately voted down, shut down and have his questions/answers deleted.
And, of course, they do not allow discussion.
Evidently, the Physics/Astronomy/Space Exploration/Politics forums exist merely to cater for a very small 'elite' of users. And they are religious-like in their dogma.

Small sliver of thought?     Dogma?     I don't find your answer useful.    There are ways to phrase theories as questions.   It's just not well received to post them as theories.

The rules on sites like Physics SE restrict questions to mainstream (broadly accepted) theories and the reason is that these sites are considered knowledge bases to help people specifically studying (formally or as a hobby) to understand mainstream concept.  In fact most (if not all) of the people answering are keen to teach their subjects (and some actually are teachers).  These sites were never intended as discussion forums or for fringe theories.  As for "small sliver", Physics SE allows questions on any of the vast array of mainstream theories.  Good luck learning all that in one life.

@StephenG Okay. But what about when the small number of physicists who dictate 'mainstream theories' have begun to lose the ability to accept anything beyond said theories and 'laws'? Example: The theory that all matter - and even space and time! - in the universe was once compacted into a point smaller than an atom. Do you actually realise how insane that sounds? And yet, on here, challenging that is not permitted.

On SE the general community "dictates" what is mainstream by voting on any suggestion to close a question as being off-mainstream or personal (and voting on reopen motions when that happens).  In fact if you can gain support via a meta question you could contribute to a rule change.  This is how democracy works on SE.

@WhitePrime "How insane that sounds".  Yes, anyone who's studied the history of physics knows exactly how insane that sounds.  "big bang" - ridiculous.   "Black holes" - "that shows the limits of Einstein's theories, we know those can't be real"  We're too smart to believe in that.  These ideas were preposterous to mainstream physics for years, but the evidence supports them.  Today we go with the evidence, it leads to better results than opinion, which used to play a bigger role.

@WhitePrime and the day science is based on democracy will be a very bad day for science.


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Replacing latex commands in edits
I have just rejected an edit of one of my posts. The edit wanted to replace numbers and symbols enclosed within mathematics delimiters, with equivalents not enclosed in latex markdown. An example is shown below:
pc$^{-2}$, (or kpc$^{-2}$) replaced with pc−2, (or kpc−2) or
$5.349\times 10^{51}$ g cm$^2$ s$^{-1}$ ($0.379\ M_\odot$ AU$^2$ yr$^{-1}$).
Replaced with
5.349 × 1051 g cm2 s−1 (0.379 M⊙ AU2 yr−1).
Cosmetically I can see why you might want to do this; my question is what would screen readers make of it?
If it's fine from an accessibility point of view then knock yourself out, there's another 2000-odd answers I've written with latex markdown.
EDIT:
I note that a default screen-reading player has appeared on Stack Exchange  pages (see screenshot below,  with screen reader play button). The reader at least identifies the mathematics markup by reading the $ symbol. Thus if someone understands latex markdown they can follow what is written.  The same reader fails to identify the alternative markdown as mathematics and does not mention the exponents at all.

I'm not clear if you're asking what screen readers would make of (1) Mathjax or (2) non-Mathjax ?

@StephenG I think screen readers can cope with mathjax

Well, I heard mobile users may have trouble with non-Mathjax version. On the other hand Mathjax needs a separate script, which many users of Noscript likely wouldn't bother to turn on. Another drawback of MJ is that it's pretty much not machine readable.

I tested this very posting with the inbuilt screen reader from my phone. Both versions were read identically. Identically badly, and I would have a hard time to understand the formula being read: "pc minus 2 or kpc minus 2 replaced with pc minus 2, or kpc minus 2 or 5349 times 1051 g cm 2 s minus 1..."
Yet from this experiment I recon that it doesn't make a difference (but I hope sincerely that more professional versions do make a difference).

There is now a screenreader that appears at the top of SE pages. It reads out the latex markdown, which I think is preferable.

I checked a free random questions, and did not find it on the mobile version. Can you be more specific where?

I see it on my mobile chrome browser (on SE pages) but not on the desktop version?

I see it neither on mobile nor desktop with my firefox browser.


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What to do about intellectual copyright infringement?
I was rather distressed to find this book available for sale.
It is just a cut and paste job of hundreds of Astronomy SE questions and answers.
I understand that people are allowed to do this under the terms of the creative commons license, but I rather thought they had to provide links to the original source and links to the user profiles of the people who had actually provided the material.
What can be done about this?

What an age we live in...these books are even available in Barnes and Noble.

And...I'm in at least four of his books. Not really how I anticipated my words first making it into a publication.

@called2voyage this gives new meaning (or nuance) to the internet is written in ink

In at least one previous case (book available here), the author - the same person - linked to both the Creative Commons license and gave the attribution required by Stack Exchange. The CMs are okay with this, as it satisfies the legalese and as the person is thought well of on SE. I can't find such attribution in this book, but not all of the pages are viewable, so it may very well be in there. If they've done it before, they've probably done it now - although I can't confirm that.
From a moral standpoint, am I okay with someone else monetizing my work? On the one hand, yeah, it's annoying. On the other, I spent time writing those answers - for free - to help people. I guess the book, too, has the potential to help people. That's the positive light in which I'll try to view it.

It looks like if you actually buy the book, the correct links are in. But looking at the preview link I provided, no such attribution is present.

@RobJeffries Well crap, just found out that whether or not the [SE-style] attribution is present doesn't matter, see my answer.

I just found out that the Stack Exchange modification to the Creative Commons license to require attribution is not legally valid. So, even without SE's attribution requirements present this reuse of the material is legally not copyright infringement (as long as it follows CC's attribution requirements):
https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/258180/228367

Just have to add your review to the book saying what you think of that then. I have.


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To the more Knowledgeable people of Astronomy se, why not try asking questions and answering them yourself?
It came to my attention that one of the possibilities offered by stack exchange is to answer your own questions. Would it help to get out of beta if people asked questions about a subject they care deeply and answer themselves? If this is the case, probably it should be done more often. Just a thought.

Stack Exchange works best if there is genuine interest in specific questions askers might have, not as a Wikipedia type digest of scientific literature or a general library on the topic. Self-answering is OK if you came across an interesting answer during your research that you might want to share, but pre-filling our contents with general Q&A about astronomy that can be easily found elsewhere should be avoided.
One reason for it is that posters should be ready for follow-ups, requests for clarification and so on, and answers should be peer-reviewed for the benefit of the asker and anyone else interested in the presented problem. If we tried preparing complete Q&A in advance, many simply wouldn't be interested in that, accept their own answers even if others are better and merely chase the fake internet points. This is not the point of Stack Exchange. Gamification of the system does make it a bit more fun, but that's really all there is to it, it really shouldn't be considered as indication that someone is an authority on the subject if he/she has many of these points.
What I'm talking about here actually happened during the early beta days of Astronomy, and we met with a lot of plagarism and shallow threads that simply aren't interesting to people that are genuinely interested about topics covered within our scope. Occasional questions like that are of course welcome, but having a genuinely interested author of them available for follow-ups creates an opportunity for really interesting answers too. This simply isn't the case with questions where authors already know answers to them, and if you browse through our earlier questions, you'll find many such examples.


text:
Are we losing imgur image links?
The top answer to this question contains two links to images on imgur.com. Both are marked as
The image you are
requesting does not exist
or is no longer available

imgur.com

Both of the images had previously been archived on archive.org, so they certainly did exist in 2021. (The answer to this question was posted in 2015.) The links on imgur.com certainly do not exist now.
I thought that the purpose of going to i.stack.imgur.com was to drastically reduce link rot for imagery. I know that several of my older answers where I naively used non-imgur.com links have suffered from image link rot. People have nicely rescued those older answers by diligently finding the sources and switching the images to i.stack.imgur.com links.
If we had a "what the bleep" tag, I would have used that. We don't, so instead I used discussion and support.
After a bit more sleuthing, the Q&A in question was captured by the WayBack Machine (archive.org), here. This links to an August 2022 capture, which portrays the images properly. The images were deleted from imgur.com sometime between August 2022 and April 2023. The images are small, so certainly are not over the size limit. Note that the April 2023 capture (which shows the link rot problem) predates the May 15 2023 change to the imgur.com TOS.
As an aside, I was in the process of answering yet another question on the analemma, so I looked for related questions and answers.
What the bleep is going on here?

I was one of the few user who took initiative in fixing the old posts. Here is one example where I removed the markup "doesn't exist" because there was already a video linked to the answer and I assumed the screenshot were from the video, so I removed them. In this case, I didn't knew what is the image and what image it could replace with. So, it was left as it is.

@NilayGhosh The image links you deleted were on i.imgur.com -- the OP anonymously uploaded the images to imgur and used Markdown to insert those anonymous images into the page view. Imgur aggressively prunes anonymous images that are rarely referenced and whose last reference is old. The images in the Q&A I referenced are at i.stack.imgur.com -- the answerer properly used the stackexchange image upload capabilities, so those images should not rot. But they did rot.

This isn't great. The problem might be specific to this set of images, but there's an outside chance it's related to the changes to SE's image hosting arrangement, so I'm going to add the [tag:status-review] tag so it gets escalated to staff.

@HDE226868 After even more sleuthing, I suspect that the copyright owner of the image may have issued a DMCA takedown order to imgur.com. The images in question are copyrighted and the copyright owner appears to be very proud of those photographs. In the photographers own words, "more men have walked on the moon than have successfully photographed the analemma."

Just to add, the copyright owner (Anthony Ayiomamitis) is very, very proud of his work, and his analemma photographs in particular: https://www.perseus.gr/Astro-Copyright.htm. "There is copyright on all of my images and unauthorized use is strictly prohibited!"

@DavidHammen Ah, interesting -- that makes a lot of sense.

Related? We've got at least 26 generic i.imgur.com image links that might break on May 15, 2023; should/could they be updated to i.stack.imgur.com?

@uhoh Kinda related. I suspect the image I flagged was subject to a DMCA takedown. Images posted on i.stack.imgur.com are not protected by the fact that they are under stack ownership but are still subject to DMCA takedowns. OTOH, imgur.com can take down those generic images any time they want for any reason they want.


text:
2022: a year in moderation

As we say goodbye to the old year and welcome the new one, we have a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the preceding calendar year.
As most of you here are aware, sites on the Stack Exchange network are moderated somewhat differently to other sites on the web:

We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.
-- A Theory of Moderation

That doesn't eliminate the need for having moderators altogether, but it does mean that the bulk of moderation work is carried out by regular folks. Every bit of time and effort y'all contribute to the site gives you access to more privileges you can use to help in this effort, all of which produce a cumulative effect that makes a big difference.
So as we say goodbye to 2022 (and where did January go, right?) and dive head first into 2023, let us look back at what we accomplished as a community... by looking at some exciting stats. Below is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on Astronomy over the past 12 months:

Action
Moderators
Community¹

All comments on a post moved to chat
8
0

Answer flags handled
221
55

Answers flagged
2
274

Comment flags handled
111
54

Comments deleted⁷
304
917

Comments flagged
1
164

Comments undeleted
2
0

Posts bumped
0
94

Posts deleted⁶
134
414

Posts locked
0
32

Posts undeleted
7
45

Posts unlocked
0
3

Question flags handled⁵
44
161

Questions closed
55
219

Questions flagged⁵
1
214

Questions migrated
13
0

Questions protected
6
12

Questions reopened
9
8

Tag synonyms created
2
0

Tag synonyms proposed
2
1

Tags merged
3
0

Tasks reviewed⁴: "Close votes" queue
8
904

Tasks reviewed⁴: "First answers" queue
0
262

Tasks reviewed⁴: "First questions" queue
3
465

Tasks reviewed⁴: "Late answers" queue
0
103

Tasks reviewed⁴: "Low quality posts" queue
2
136

Tasks reviewed⁴: "Reopen votes" queue
3
96

Tasks reviewed⁴: "Suggested edits" queue
17
538

Users contacted
7
0

Users destroyed³
2
0

Users suspended²
5
20

Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Astronomy without diamonds next to their names, and to the automated systems otherwise known as user #-1.
² The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.
³ A "destroyed" user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.
⁴ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.
⁵ Includes close flags (but not close or reopen votes). Community can handle these flags by at least one person voting to close a question that has a close flag.
⁶ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.
⁷ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).
Further reading:

Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? We posted a similar report here last year: 2021: a year in moderation

You can also check out this report on other sites

Or peruse detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites

Wishing everyone a happy 2023! ^_^

Thank you once again for all of the "exciting stats" :-)

To put these numbers in context, it would be helpful to see stats on the total number of questions asked, total number of answers provided, and total number of comments made, all prior to cleanup. But this does give insight into how busy those users with a diamond next to their name had been in 2022. The provided stats also tells us that community involvement is extremely important.


text:
2020: a year in moderation

As we say goodbye to the old year and welcome the new one, we have a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the past 12 months.
As most of you here are aware, sites on the Stack Exchange network are moderated somewhat differently to other sites on the web:

We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.
-- A Theory of Moderation

That doesn't eliminate the need for having moderators altogether, but it does mean that the bulk of moderation work is carried out by regular folks. Every bit of time and effort y'all contribute to the site gives you access to more privileges you can use to help in this effort, all of which produce a cumulative effect that makes a big difference.
So as we welcome 2021, and in keeping with tradition, let us look back at what we accomplished as a community... by looking at some exciting stats. Below is a breakdown of moderation actions performed on Astronomy over the past 12 months:

Action
Moderators
Community¹

Users suspended²
4
7

Users destroyed³
14
0

Users deleted
3
0

Users contacted
13
0

Tasks reviewed⁴: Suggested Edit queue
12
917

Tasks reviewed⁴: Reopen Vote queue
2
131

Tasks reviewed⁴: Low Quality Posts queue
0
438

Tasks reviewed⁴: Late Answer queue
0
208

Tasks reviewed⁴: First Post queue
1
1,168

Tasks reviewed⁴: Close Votes queue
2
1,377

Tags merged
7
0

Tag synonyms proposed
4
1

Tag synonyms created
4
0

Revisions redacted
1
0

Questions reopened
13
7

Questions protected
0
16

Questions migrated
22
2

Questions merged
5
0

Questions flagged⁵
4
617

Questions closed
48
325

Question flags handled⁵
121
503

Posts unlocked
1
1

Posts undeleted
6
38

Posts locked
7
117

Posts deleted⁶
234
593

Posts bumped
0
117

Comments undeleted
2
0

Comments flagged
1
232

Comments deleted⁷
551
1,183

Comment flags handled
191
43

Bounties canceled
1
0

Answers flagged
7
626

Answer flags handled
448
189

All comments on a post moved to chat
15
0

Footnotes
¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Astronomy without diamonds next to their names, and to the automated systems otherwise known as user #-1.
² The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.
³ A "destroyed" user is deleted along with all that they had posted: questions, answers, comments. Generally used as an expedient way of getting rid of spam.
⁴ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.
⁵ Includes close flags (but not close or reopen votes).
⁶ This ignores numerous deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.
⁷ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).
Further reading:

Wanna see how these numbers have changed over time? We posted a similar report here last year: 2019: a year in moderation

You can also check out this report on other sites

Or peruse detailed information on the number of questions closed and reopened across all sites

A big thank you to Shog9 for writing the queries and script to facilitate fetching and posting this data to all the sites in the network, and to Brian for the subsequent work making the whole thing more user friendly.
Wishing everyone a happy 2021!

Thank you, moderators, and Happy New Year to both the moderators and to all the site members who do not have a diamond next to their names.


text:
A modest proposal to increase question quality
Highly related: What can we do about the deteriorating quality of questions?

This related question was asked over five years ago, and the situation has not improved. My perception is the opposite: A marked decrease in question quality all across the science based portions of the SE network since the decision was made to double the point value awarded to questions. This decision has encouraged people to write very low quality questions.
Bad questions will drive good answerers away.
I am on the verge of being driven away, in part due to the marked reduction in question quality, in part due to other bad technical decisions such as copyright, and in part due to the terrible treatment of SE moderators. I have noticed a drop-off in activity by other highly rated answerers. Doubling the bonus for asking questions is not the right answer.
The downvote penalty was not enough five years ago when the related question was asked, and now that minor penalty has been watered down even more. My modest proposal: Triple the penalty for downvotes.

I've appended the [tag:status-review] tag in accordance with the new guidance from SE. This tag puts questions in a queue that they will see directly and address when they get to that queue item.

Besides the difficult to prove premise that "things were better in the old days" is the premise that if that in fact were true, it's not the dearth of good questions, but only the (supposed) abundance of bad questions that will drive good answerers away. While you are an exceptional answerer, that exception also suggests you may not be a good model for other answerers. Are there others that can also confirm that they are not driven away by the lack of good answers but only by the number of not-good ones?

This proposes a 3x bigger stick, but what can be proposed in the carrot department?

The carrot was given away for free, @uhoh, when the points awarded for questions was doubled without any corresponding change in the downvote penalty.

I see, so they put the cart before the horse by putting the carrot before the stick. Luckily they did not put the carrot before the horse or it would have just eaten it.

My impression is that a significant majority of low quality questions (across the network) are posted by 1 rep newbies. Since the downvote penalty has zero affect on their rep score, tripling it wouldn't make a difference.

As others have noted in the existing answers, I'm not sure this would have the effect you hope it would. If you see increasing the reward for question upvotes as a thing that encourages low-quality questions, then I'd say there may be something about the voting culture on Astronomy that needs to be looked at — are people up- and downvoting when appropriate?
Furthermore, this is definitely not something we're gonna be customizing per-site. As such, I'll status-declined it.
Our ongoing work on review queues is hopefully gonna be helpful in increasing question quality too, and making sure the low-quality posts get the help they need to get to the right place — so keep an eye on updates on that front.

side comment for other readers (not you specifically). To "...are people up- and downvoting when appropriate?" I think that people could up vote more often. I see so many questions with well-received answers where the only, lonely up vote on the question is mine. People should realize that a question that begets good answers is a great benefit to the site and deserves up votes. This will encourage more questions, which is the only way that more answers can be posted.

My personal feeling is that down voting harder will not increase the number of the kind of questions that would cause question-answerers to stay and not leave. Angst begets angst.
I don't know about others, but I certainly don't self-censor out of a fear of getting down voted. Instead I first think about what questions will tend to lead to interesting answers, and then think about ways to write it so that it is not closed. That's just me; I'm not interested in getting more votes, rather I'm focused on providing opportunities for good and interesting answers to be posted.
Also see this answer to Should we use +5 instead of +10 if this becomes possible in the future? in Politics SE meta. All three answers there are some qualified form of "No, leave votes on questions at +10".
I think it would be great to work on finding more carrots, but I don't think a bigger stick is going to improve the frequency of answerer-retaining questions being asked.
I doubt there is any evidence that increasing the sting that each individual down voter can deliver has ever worked in another site, but if there was some it would be good to know about.


text:
How do I become a "follower" for a tag?
I was thinking that becoming a follower will let me know when there are new questions about the tags I'm interested in. However I can't figure out how to become a follower or if becoming one will accomplish what I want.


text:
999 questions with no answers and counting (downwards)
Recently I started focusing on older unanswered questions, and I realized that today we reached 999 questions with no answers and I find this repdigit number (German: Schnapszahl) worth mentioning or celebrating.
Anyhow, my main question is: With no access to site statistics can I somehow determine the answer ratio on Astronomy Stack Exchange of 1.6 myself?

I have the overall number of question (10566), the ones with no upvoted or accepted answers (1077), and the one with no answer at all (999). This looks like an underdetermined equation, so I would love to see a histogram of how many questions have 0, 1, 2, 3, ... answers. Just out of curiosity and since I love statistics.
Related

Are we graduating sometime soon?

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
Frequency

0
1342

1
5483

2
2480

3
790

4
270

5
95

6
42

7
13

8
7

9
3

10
2

11
1

12
1

and here is your histogram, or at least the best I can do with SEDE:

As for where the 1.6 comes from: community members have guessed the formula and user @rene wrote a SEDE query here and running it for Astronomy Stack Exchange gives a value of 1.558, which is rounded to one decimal.

Thanks so much! I was hoping for power law (with a cutoff), but I am somehow excited that it is indeed one.


text:
How to proceed with tags with only a single occurence?
What is the correct way of treating rare tags, say with a single occurence? I just figured out that tags without any occurrence are most likely synonyms (which is not obvious from the tag-overview page), but that's a different topic.
For some of the tags, it is obvious, that we should search all questions and add the tag (e.g. big-rip or spitzer-space-telescope) to the question, since most probably, the tag did not exist yet when some questions have been asked.
But what about the other tags (like anomaly, time-domain-astronomy, and many more, see screenshot) with a single occurrence? Should we discuss every single one of them?

Don't worry about them too much. Tags which are only used once and have no tag wiki are automatically deleted after six months. There's a small risk the question may end up untagged but only if it has no other tags, which is usually not the case.

Aha! I wonder if that's what happened here How did my question become untagged?

@uhoh very likely. That happened 6.5 months after asking the question. I don't know for sure, and the Wayback Machine doesn't contain copies of the question from 2018.

Oh, that seems too close to be a coincidence. Thanks, mystery solved! Feel free to post a speculative answer there for me to accept.


text:
Should we make the [starspot] and [sunspots] tags synonyms?
This suggestion was made in the comments to the question Do brown dwarfs have starspots? It is about sunspots (9 questions) vs. starspot (6 questions) . The latter tag I recently created. The user @John wrote:

I ain't sure if it's a good idea to create two separate tags sun- and starspot. The Sun is a star. I suggest sunspot be made synonymous with starspot, and if they're ones concerning the Sun you can add the tag Sun to your question.

I tend to agree with that. Any other thoughts?

I'm not so sure. Are they technically the same phenomena? Yes. However, just like with planet vs. exoplanet, the study of each is very different.

Since observed starspots are huge (the ones imaged or detected are of order the diameter of the star itself) and can happen on stars very, very different than our Sun, they really may not be the same phenomenon. And since even then they are barely resolved the underlying phenomenon might not be star spots at all; a question tagged starspot might turn out to be passing globs of dust in front of the star or even something else. I'd leave them separate.

Converting my comment to an answer in order to spark some activity and perhaps other viewpoints:

Since observed starspots are huge (the ones imaged or detected are of order the diameter of the star itself) and can happen on stars very, very different than our Sun, they really may not be the same phenomenon. And since even then they are barely resolved the underlying phenomenon might not be star spots at all; a question tagged starspot might turn out to be passing globs of dust in front of the star or even something else. I'd leave them separate.


text:
What exactly count as a "hypothetical question"?
From help-center:

Questions that are purely hypothetical, for example a question such as 'Could a black hole destroy the universe' or 'What if our solar system had two suns' (however, feel free to visit World Building) [are off-topic]

From my understanding, a "hypothetical question" is a question discussing events/observation not possible in real universe or an imaginary event (suppose gravity stops for 1 sec, what will happen? or suppose Moon vanishes, what will happen to Earth?), imaginary scenarios (stepping on sun). Many such question starts with "What if", "What would happen" or "Suppose" and they should be closed based on the above rule (however not all question are technically hypothetical). But, there is an inconsistency in closing "hypothetical question". While some are closed as "opinion-based" or "not within the scope", some are open and has answers. I don't mind answers on those question but shouldn't it count as "hypothetical questions" and thus should be closed?
I did some look-up and listed some of the questions:

What would happen if (imaginary tennis ball colliding with sun- closed)
Would an object falling into a black hole ever collide with the surface of the black hole? (elephants falling in black hole - open)
What would happen if a medium -sized black hole passed the Earth? (open)
What would happen if we stepped on the Sun? (open)
What if the Sun turned into a red giant tomorrow? (closed)
What would happen if a spaceship goes faster than the speed of light? (closed)
What if one teleportes to a star that is some light years away? (closed)
What would happen if the Sun, Moon and Earth were isolated? (open)
What would happen if a planet is removed from the solar system? (open)
What would happen to the Galilean moons and Titan if Jupiter and Saturn disappeared? (open)

...and there are many more
Now there are posts discussing about scenarios that are not technically "hypothetical" and can be possible if done in the near future. For e.g. "In the near future, a space probe is launched and is tasked to release ice cubes and water in space, what will happen?" (post 1, post 2).
Question: What exactly counts as a "hypothetical question"?

Related but different: Thought experiment questions that aren't completely scientific?

This is a great question! I think that many thought experiment questions can be useful and should stay open. Einstein certainly found such exercises helpful! This will be hard to figure out but it's probably worth it.

In my view it is a question about something that could not happen, but I would not vote-to-close purely on that basis.
From your list, that applies to (I think) 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.
Some of them, particularly 8, 9, 10 are salvageable by changing the question to be more general rather than about our Solar System (since there are so many other "solar systems" out there, that particular configurations almost certainly occur somewhere).
2 is just a misapprehension that requires a simple answer, 3 is hypothetical but perfectly possible (so I would allow it).
There is though another batch of "hypothetical questions" that I really like - these are the ones that ask how a particular physical situation would develop if you change the initial conditions or alter some particular aspect of the (astro)physics. Some of these are possible, but some aren't or are exceedingly unlikely. Neverthless the reason I like them, and would be sad to see them disallowed, is that they encourage a much deeper understanding of what is going on and for that reason I often like to set these as problems for students or even as examination questions.
Examples that I have answered would include:
Would we have more than 8 minutes of light, if the Sun "went out"?
How large can a ball of water be without fusion starting?
If Alpha Centauri A's solar system exactly mirrored our own, what would we be able to detect?
What would the night sky look like if the Milky Way were the only galaxy in the universe?
Would a tablespoon of a neutron star remain intact?
What would the night sky look like if the interstellar medium didn't exist to absorb or block light?
Would stars have formed in the Universe if atomic hydrogen couldn't make molecular hydrogen?
How much larger would a star have to be to cause thermonuclear reactions if it was made out of mostly rock like Earth, instead of gases?
... and you get the idea.

I don't think the criterion should be whether something could happen or not, it should be whether it would be testable or not, i.e., does science apply. Science is still based on experimentation and observation, even if applied to situations we can only imagine. I can only imagine what sunrise would look like in another stellar system, but the question has some validity because I can also imagine how a camera could answer the question.
What would happen if a spaceship went faster than c is not valid, because I cannot imagine how to measure that speed within the context of c being the universal speed limit. Of course, modern physics might be wrong, which means there has to be a paradigm shift to answer your question. As Thomas Kuhn pointed out, such a paradigm shift not only invalidates answers, it invalidates questions too.


text:
Can I nominate someone for an award for answering an extremely tough question?
Is there a way of asking for someone to receive a medal or badge such as "badge for answering an extremely tough question that many other people struggled to answer?"
In this particular case I am thinking specifically of Can Eight Retrograde (seen from Earth) planets occur? but my question here applies generally.

That was a particularly cool question, and it's great that @barrycarter took the time to dig in and find some solutions! I've stopped by to up vote that answer, I hadn't seen it until you mentioned it here. Unfortunately things like nominating specific people for specific things doesn't really happen in Stack Exchange (except for moderator elections). Early on there was a lot of gaming the system activities, users working together to up each others' reputation (points) so now it's pretty much just the community's up voting.

As pointed out in the other answer, there is the bounty system but it's zero-sun-gain, you have to lose for someone else to gain. Even that system was gamed in the beginning and had to be modified accordingly, see answers to: Any way to award a second +100 bounty to a second answer to the same question? as well as Will/would it be impossible for me to add a third bounty here? Why was 500 my only choice for #2?.

Also see How does the bounty auto-award work? and also Is there any utility for a 24 hour grace period on bounties on questions with no answers? for further details.

I get what you mean; I, too, have gotten some amazing answers across Stack Exchange that made me think "Wow, where did that come from?" While you can't award someone a badge for top-notch work, you can offer a bounty on the question (assuming it's at least two days old) of anywhere from 50 to 500 reputation points, and award it to their answer. Now, that does require you to have enough reputation points to give away, and right now you only have 21, but if you keep asking good questions and writing good answers, I'm sure you'll get there in no time.


text:
Congratulations to @ProfRob for reaching 100k reputation!
Congratulations!!!
I'm quite late to the party after a break from SE, and I've seen that @ProfRob has hit 100,000 reputation, a new milestone for our site!

In honor of this amazing contribution of effort and knowledge to this site we can check if ProfRob has answered some of our questions that we haven’t yet accepted.

Thank you for putting so much time and effort into astronomy.se and showing that the internet is good for more than just fake news and cat videos.

Bit late to this one, but as a newcomer to this astronomy.SE, I want to say I feel extremely lucky to have someone who is so knowledgeable, good at explaining and willing to dedicate so much time to helping others learn about astronomy. Thanks.