Astronomy Picture Of The Day
The study of space objects such as planets, galaxies and stars is Astronomy. Some people do it for a living, others just to pass the time. So people tend to flock to an astronomy picture of the day. They’re all over the place.
NASA is a great source to find and astronomy picture of the day. Their web site, nasa.gov, presents a new photo every day. The multimedia section shows both images and videos. These could be great sources for a person to create their own site that offers a new image each day. November 5, 2008 showed a close view of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. The photo was taken by a passing spacecraft. It gets down to details the size of the bus. One interesting feature of the ice on Enceladus is that it reflects 99% of the light that falls onto it. Talk about snow blind. The moon is so interesting that Cassini will continue to fly by for more images later in its mission.
NASA maintains an archive of all the astronomy photos of the day dating all the way back to June 16 of 1995. It was a what if image of the Earth posing as a neutron star. The image is a computer generation. The most interesting feature is that the constellation Orion is visible twice. That’s because a neutron star is dense enough to bend light from behind it to the front of it. This distortion causes double images of some objects.
September 8, 1995 was an amazing image of the central part of the Milky Way galaxy taken by NASA’s COBE satellite. Due to space dust this would normally not be visible to the naked eye or to a telescope. But COBE scans in infrared, so produced the amazing image of our very symmetrical galaxy.
January 1, 2000 and January 1, 2001 shared the same image, a drawing really, of the universe as defined in the last millennium. The reason both dates shared this image is that most people considered the year 2000 as the first year of the third millennium. But in reality the new millennium started on January 1, 2001. Instead of arguing NASA used both dates. http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap010101.html shows man’s view of the universe as it progressed from orbs that orbit around the Earth all the way to the Big Bang creating the universe as we know it.
It would be very hard to see each and every astronomy picture of the day. You’ll find them on NASA’s website.
