Astronomy Picture Of The Day

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Thursday, January 15th, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed

Astronomy is a study of outer space. It’s important science, but for many people an enjoyable hobby. 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. On November 5, 2008, NASA’s picture of the day was a close view of Saturn’s moon, Enceladus. It was taken by the Cassini space craft as it passed about 1,700 kilometers from the surface. The image is crisp enough to see a small bus, if there were one on the moon. 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 plan is that Cassini will take more images of this moon later in its mission.

NASA’s images of the day go all the way back to June 16, 1995. It was a representation of the earth as if it were as dense as a neutron star. The image is a computer generation. The most interesting feature is that the constellation Orion is visible twice. The reason is that a Neutron star is so dense that light, even from behind the star, is visible as it is pulled around by the intense gravity. That’s why some objects are seen twice.

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 in 2000 and 2001 had the very same astronomy picture of the day. That’s because most people believe the year 2000 was the first year of the new millennium. However the third millennium actually began on January 1, 2001. NASA figured it was better to just go with both. The image found at http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap010101.html shows the progression of our picture of the universe from orbs that rotate around the Earth all the way to the big bang event creating an ever expanding cosmos.

There are countless days each with their own astronomy picture of the day. Go to NASA’s website for more.

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