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In astronomy
* Messier object M42, a magnitude 5.0 diffuse nebula in the constellation Orion, also known as the Orion Nebula
* The New General Catalogue object NGC 42, a spiral galaxy in the constellation Pegasus
* In January 2004, asteroid 2001 DA42 was given the permanent name 25924 Douglasadams, for the author Douglas Adams who popularized the number 42 and died in 2001. Brian G. Marsden, the director of the Minor Planet Center and the secretary for the naming committee, remarked that, with even his initials in the provisional designation, "This was sort of made for him, wasn't it?"
In technology
* Magic numbers used by programmers: The glyph, or character, corresponding to the number 42 in the ASCII character set, is
*, the asterisk, commonly known as the wildcard character. o In the TIFF image file format, the second 16-bit word of every file is 42, which is used together with the first word to indicate byte order. o In the reiser4 file system, 42 is the inode number of the root directory.
* The GNU C Library, a set of standard routines available for use in computer programming, contains a function—memfrob()—which performs an XOR combination of a given variable and the binary pattern 00101010 (42) as an XOR cipher.
* 42 is the result given by the web search engines Wolfram Alpha, Google and Microsoft's Bing when the query "the answer to life the universe and everything" is entered as a search.
* One of Advanced Micro Devices' Overlocking CPU was named Phenom 42, with the number being partially from the book The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
* Tiling a plane using regular hexagons, which is honeycomb in appearance, is approximated in a topological sense to an accuracy of better than 1% using a stretcher bond brick pattern with bricks of 42 squares (6 by 7).[8]
In other fields
* There are 42 gallons in a barrel of oil.
* Tower 42 is a skyscraper in the City of London, formerly known as the NatWest Tower.
* The name of a Texan trick-taking game played with dominoes (see 42 (dominoes)).
* The number of spots (or pips, circular patches or pits) on a pair of standard six-sided dice.
* In New York City, 42nd Street is a main and very popular two-way thoroughfare. Landmarks on it include the Chrysler Building, Grand Central Terminal, the main branch of the New York Public Library, and Times Square. The New York City street is also the setting for a movie by the same name (which also gave fame to its eponymous title song), and which later inspired a musical adaptation, 42nd Street.
* Popular gadget magazine Stuff did not produce an issue numbered 42, in honor of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, instead, the 41st issue was followed by the 43rd.
* The designation within ISO/IEC JTC1/SC7 of its working group on Architecture was chosen to be "WG 42" because architecture is the answer to "Life, the Universe and Everything", skipping over designations 26 through 41.