Astronomy Picture Of The Day

yyyeeeaaaaahhhhhh... APOD delivers. The first strike in an intergalactic war!!!

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0707/lasergalaxy_beletsky_big.jpg

(Not raelly.)

Anyone have pictures of The Hole yet?

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070823_huge_hole.html

except, well, this, but I mean a real pic

http://www.nrao.edu/pr/2007/coldspot/void_small.jpg

"photoshop this hat" competition?

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/raw/casJPGBrowseS33/N00091826.jpg

Yesterday's aurora + meteor was pretty mindblowing. Instant desktop picture.

Yeah, that green was eerie.

(link for future readers who are too lazy to go look up the date on the nasa site: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap071009.html )

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0710/aurora_kuenzli_big.jpg

Whoa.

http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/2007/36/images/a/formats/large_web.jpg

More here: http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2007/36/

http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/images/2008/details/PSP_007338_2640.jpg

That dust cloud is from an avalanche on Mars, which was imaged as it was happening. Yaow. More: http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/PSP_007338_2640

wow

Now that is extraordinary...

We demand live webcamming from Mars!

the subimage on the website it cool, that huge long reef and the tiny little avalanche happening further down.

*is

HOLY CR*P (click the pic for even bigger & sharper - they've applied some fancy new sharpness filtering thing to a picture of a galaxy that's 28 million lightyears away)

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080308.html

M104 Hubble Remix

NOIZE

on the contrary - they removed all of it! :-)

Yeah, I turned today's pic into my new desktop image as soon as I saw it.

there's something about this that i like, surface of mars. looks so alien (perhaps unsurprisingly).

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080615.html

i really love astronomy picture of the day, but sometimes i get a bit 'woooaaah!-oh, oh, artists's impression. oh.'

http://www.theonion.com/content/files/images/hubble_article_large.article_large.jpg

<A href=http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080801.html>;The Moon is 19 inches across</a>

i liked the tiny moon. all it needs now is a stick.

today's eclipse picture is nice:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080807.html

am sure this is a repeat though, because i posted it here (somewhere?) the first time. international space station vs the sun:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080730.html

yes:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap060921.html

Ha ha, Moon Games is great.

I have no idea where I found this Roger Blandfoard quote, and it's not a picture, but here seems as good a place as any to put it:

A neutron star is a solar–mass worth of mundane and exotic nuclei and fundamental particles trapped by gravity at supranuclear densities, exhibiting superfluidity and superconductivity. The star is encased within a solid crust, a liquid ocean, a gaseous atmosphere, and a relativistic plasma magnetosphere capable of inducing zettavolt electromotive forces and radiating intense, coherent emission. Neutron stars are used to test general relativity and to search for gravitational radiation. The neutron star in question is also a “magnetar,” which gives it one further remarkable feature. The magnetic field strength is around a petagauss, a billion times larger than can be sustained on Earth and well over the quantum electrodynamic critical field. A magnetar is a star designed by a committee of physicists, each trying to outdo the other. On this occasion, it appears that a stellar flare occurred, released 13 orders of magnitude more magnetic energy than the greatest solar flare, and created a burst of gamma rays intense enough to reach across the galaxy and rattle our atmosphere.

lol stars.

stellar flare!

worst astronomy picture of the day ever!

Agreed.

Still love the Himalayan Sunrise though...

it is actually quite mind-boggling, a picture of one of saturn's moons. only the fractal nature of such images and the lack of scale means it just looks like a close-up of my back garden after it's rained.

http://i38.tinypic.com/16ke3r7.jpg

wait this one's better

http://i36.tinypic.com/r874lj.jpg

http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/2003/11/images/i/formats/full_jpg.jpghttp://www.j-m-w-turner.co.uk/images/The_fighting_Temeraire.jpg

Left: The Fighting Temeraire, tugged to her Last Berth to be broken up, 1838, 91 x 122 cm. Right: The mother-fucking Helix Nebula, a trillion mile long tunnel of glowing gas

More Helix nebula http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2003/11/image/

aren't all the hubble pictures artificially coloured anyway?

http://hubblesite.org/gallery/behind_the_pictures/meaning_of_color/

"The colors in Hubble images, which are assigned for various reasons, aren't always what we'd see if we were able to visit the imaged objects in a spacecraft. We often use color as a tool, whether it is to enhance an object's detail or to visualize what ordinarily could never be seen by the human eye."

Kinda. That image was taken with three different filters on two cameras, which allows them to make a pretty good colour version.

The most reliable images colourwise are the old school ones taken with photographic plates, e.g. http://www.aao.gov.au/images/general/emission.html

In space, no one can see you colour.

Does anyone here do DIY astronomy imaging? I've seen some stuff recently and you can take some amazing pictures with digital camera technology (multiple exposures, adding the light in layers, using filters, etc.).

Holy mother...
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

Thats the greatest!

fucking amazing.

is this the first time they've had a video up on apod?

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/10/enceladus_up_close.html

http://cache.boston.com/universal/site_graphics/blogs/bigpicture/enc_10_24/enc09_approach.gif

This sequence of 12 frames was taken over a span of about 45 minutes on March 12, 2008. In that brief time, Cassini covered almost 40,000 kilometers in its approach to a flyby encounter with Enceladus. The overexposure and smearing of the images gives a hint of the raw speed involved - 14.4 km/sec (or 32,211 mph). Shortly after this sequence, at its closest, Casini approached within 52 km (32.3 miles) of the surface of Enceladus. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

p.s. if you like astronomy pictures and hate cancer then you should all buy one of these:

http://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/skyphoto/images/double_frame.png

http://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/skyphoto/

This kid is five years old and has had leukemia for four of those years.

those are U.K. only for the time being, btw, but they're hopefully working on non-U.K. sales.

That'll make a neat Christmas present for my father. Thanks!

(It's his birthday tomorrow and one of his presents seems to be lost in the post, so if I had my chequebook I might even have tried wandering across town to see if they could produce one on the spot, but no chequebook, so I guess I'm spared being that annoying person...)

(Oh hey, Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell signature editions and everything!)

This album, FYI:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superunknown

Check the simulation

There's a brief write-up at @PhysicsWorld here: https://t.co/dqI3RoCjuL with more images. Here's the image seen (left) compared with a simulation (middle) and the simulation blurred to the expected resolution of the telescope (right). (Image via Akiyama et al & ApJL) pic.twitter.com/UqAVdUtndK

— Katie Mack (@AstroKatie) April 10, 2019

livestream here of Jupiter-Saturn conjunction...this last happened (w/ this visibilty) 800 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0799Kmke-k

would wear on a t-shirt. (would make a perfect autechre cover also)

https://eventhorizontelescope.org/blog/astronomers-image-magnetic-fields-edge-m87s-black-hole