The campsite looks like crop circles!!! What is the central circle of trees/shrubs?

The google links were brilliant, l love being able to see the actual places!
Looks like it could definitely be a mysterious atmosphere.
Combine mizzle, some adult beverages, nighttime and a campfire and it sounds like you have all the ingredients for a Blair witch event! :)

Yeah, there was even a bizarre Y-shaped stick planted at the end of our camp area. I hung my towel on it. >_>

The central thing was just some trees, and then the local dumpster and recycling bins.

Thanks for the link to Crimson Dark!
Even though he uses poser and a complicated graphics process its excellent. Not quite the same as hand-drawn, though. That quality gives SMBH a razor-sharpness.
But there are other genuine space-epics, like the daily Escape from Terra . Very well drawn and intelligent. Almost by the same people is Phoebus Krumm, which is set in a strange clanky retro future.
Also Galaxion- a long-running story with terrific art that has lots of flashbacks and side-stories, and Spacetrawler that is weird but funny.
I keep finding these strips, so there must be more.
The internet needs better charts for navigation, but you still have to search anyway because the real space-saga type SF is hard to find.

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 10, Page 77
• A* Episode 10, Page 78

The AP put out a news article today saying that the Moon is shrinking; apparently some scientists have decided that the look of certain fissures on the Moon's surface indicate that it's been shrinking as it cools from its formation. The interesting thing about this I guess is that the cracks look fairly recent, geologically speaking, and may indicate that the Moon is more geologically active than previously thought.

Still, poor Moon! And I seem to recall reading somewhere recently that the Moon is also gradually getting farther and farther from Earth. It can't seem to catch a break! Although I suppose that's better than it getting closer and closer.

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There was a minor ripple in the webcomics world today as comic hosting site ComicSpace, after a surprise week of downtime, just as surprisingly came back, having apparently deleted many of the comics it hosted, and converted the survivors to a generic WordPress template, while moving them all to different URLs. For instance, I had all five of my comic series mirrored there, but now there's only A*, and it doesn't even fit inside the template it's been stuck in. (You can see it here for now; I'm probably going to delete my account there within a week.)

And no FAQ on the changes, or even an acknowledgment of the change. This is not the way to retain your content providers, ComicSpace! Oh well. It was the weakest of the sites I mirror my comics to, so no big loss I suppose; still, I did have a small number of folks following my comics there; hopefully they'll find their way here or to a more functional mirror site.

Those others are listed on the about page, incidentally. Also today, another of them hit a glitch where it reported having no comics for any of the thousands of webcomics it's hosting. I won't tell you which one since the site has an active admin and presumably they'll get it fixed up shortly. Funkiness like this is sadly rather common on free webcomic hosting services; the one that's been stable for me since I started is also the largest: Smack Jeeves (here's the A* mirror on Smack Jeeves). So well done, SJ; you are a shining light of reliability in the world of free webcomic hosting, and hopefully I haven't just jinxed you.

Say that reminds me, I noticed it was a fullish moon tonight around these parts, although I couldn't tell if it was completely full because these dark ominous clouds were blowing across, just partly revealing it. If only it had been bigger, maybe I would have been able to tell... =P Anyway it still looked pretty neat.

Added 1 new A* page:

• A* Episode 10, Page 79

Yep another 1 page lackadaisical Friday! On the plus side though next week should be pretty good for comic output since my gym will be closed for renovations--so I'll probably just sit around getting fat and drawing comics, wooo.

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There was an article making the rounds in the past day or so about an extra large magnetar. Magnetars are neutron stars that happen to have a large spin magnetic moment--having to do with quantum "spin" which is kind of a confusing thing--giving them a large magnetic charge, although this charge fades after a mere 10,000 years or so. Their magnetic field is measured in the range of gigateslas, or one billion teslas, one tesla being a magnetic force equivalent to what you get from a strong rare earth magnet.

It sounds impressive, but isn't all that much; while a magnetar's charge is enough to pull a human body apart at 1000 km, or to screw up your credit cards at about half the distance of the Moon to Earth (says Wikipedia), a neutron star, which is a super-dense remnant of a supernova--basically what happens when stars below about three solar masses go supernova: you end up with really dense matter (sometimes called "neutronium" which is a bit silly, but basically it's neutron-heavy stuff so dense that a teaspoonful would weigh something like five trillion kilograms :o) in an amount not quite sufficient to collapse into a singularity--is much more likely to do destructive things to you via gravity, radiation, or a pulsar beam or something. Still, you have to admit that "magnetar" and "gigatesla" are super-cool-sounding words.

Anyway, because magnetars don't last very long, there aren't very many known; this particular one, CXO J164710.2-455216, in the "super star cluster" Westerlund 1, somewhere between 12,000 and 16,000 light years from Earth, is the closest one known. The stars in the cluster--many of which are unusually large--are thought to have formed in a single big burst of star formation 4 or 5 million years ago, which makes them quite young; and since they all formed at the same time, and one already went and supernovaed into this magnetar, that means it must have been larger (since larger stars die faster) than any of the other stars still there, and I guess the largest of those is just about 40 solar masses.


image by NASA/CXC/UCLA/M.Muno et al. (source)

So the question was, why did a star of 40+ solar masses supernova into a neutron star instead of a black hole? You need a remnant of about 3 solar masses in order to collapse into a black hole, and it had been thought that a star of 20 solar masses or more would leave you with at least that much after its supernova--but somehow in this case, the supernova of what must have been a very large star left much less mass behind than expected, little enough that it couldn't collapse into a black hole. So one idea is that this star had a binary companion that helped strip away a lot of the mass.

Still, it isn't as though scientists have had a whole lot of opportunity to study actual supernova explosions, so who's to say that they don't just blow off way more material than current theories think they do? It had been thought that stars lost something like 75 to 90 percent of their material in a supernova, but maybe it's more like the 95 percent that the Westerlund 1 magnetar appears to have lost; or maybe mass loss in a supernova is way more unpredictable than nice convenient theoretical formulas would like.

Westerlund 1 is a pretty cool place. According to this new article, although it's hard to observe due to obscuring gas and dust, it's estimated to weigh in at about 100,000 solar masses, and all the stars in it are big ones: 30 to 40 solar masses. At a mere 6 light years across, it's as dense as areas typically much closer to the galactic core (like A*'s setting :). I liked this description in the article by lead researcher Ben Ritchie:

"If the Sun were located at the heart of this remarkable cluster, our night sky would be full of hundreds of stars as bright as the full Moon."

That's the type of environment I've been trying to portray in A* (here, for instance), and this is the first instance I can recall of a quote in plain English from an astronomer actually talking about it in quantifiable visual terms.

Here's a niftier photo of the cluster, taken in infrared light (the above photos were visible light and X-rays, respectively):


image by 2MASS/UMass/IPAC-Caltech/NASA/NSF (source)

I keep running into situations where it would be handy to have stuff in a slightly higher resolution, even for non-print stuff, so I think I'm going to double my working image resolution. Did sort of a spontaneous Selenis pinup at x4 resolution and it went all right.

Added 3 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 10, Page 80
• A* Episode 10, Page 81
• A* Episode 10, Page 82

It isn't immediately obvious in the low res versions you see here on the web, but I'm now drawing A* at twice the resolution I was on, say, Friday. This makes it easier to go into little details, but mostly it helps if I want to re-use parts of a drawing for something else, like a banner or poster or something. Also, any prints you order of this drawn-in-higher-res stuff will come out even sharper than previously.

I did a little test of this higher res lasso drawing late Friday, and it actually ended up coming out pretty well as its own drawing. Here it is (and for future reference, will reside in the episode 10 gallery):

Added 3 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 10, Page 83
• A* Episode 10, Page 84
• A* Episode 10, Page 85

Kind of an orgy of icon-making went on tonight; these reside on the icons page but here are the new ones specifically:











As you might notice there I did add a bit to the bottom of the smallish drawing of Selenis from today's page 81; I started doing that when it seemed to want to fit into this little composition, which will reside in the episode 10 gallery:

Added 2 new A* pages:

• A* Episode 10, Page 86
• A* Episode 10, Page 87

Man I was worried I wasn't gonna get this update in, because for hours and hours just before now I couldn't get through to the site--or to my hosting provider; I could reach *other* sites on the internet, and according to things like downforeveryoneorjustme.com and browsershots.org, they were still up, and other people could reach them--just not *me*. Gahhh that was frustrating; second time that's happened in the past week or two, too, which is worrying. Might be some kind of Internet karma, though: in the networking world, this kind of spot access problem is called a black hole. =p

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I spent a somewhat ridiculous time messing with the eyes in page 87; in cases like this I should really just go with the first or second try and move on, but I can never seem to let things go if I see something I think I can make better. So here was how the eyevolution--oh that is horrible, I am never going to say that again--went: