Easy Astronomy Blog

I had a request for more content on Picture of the day so I’m sharing some amazing shots with you here. Click the pictures to see them full size.

Orion’s belt

Explanation : Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka, are the bright bluish stars from east to west (left to right) along the diagonal in this gorgeous cosmic vista. Otherwise known as the Belt of Orion, these three blue supergiant stars are hotter and much more massive than the Sun. They lie about 1,500 light-years away, born of Orion’s well-studied interstellar clouds. In fact, clouds of gas and dust adrift in this region have intriguing and some surprisingly familiar shapes, including the dark Horsehead Nebula and Flame Nebula near Alnitak at the lower left. The famous Orion Nebula itself lies off the bottom of this star field that covers about 4.5×3.5 degrees on the sky. This image was taken last month with a digital camera attached to a small telescope in Switzerland, and better matches human color perception than a more detailed composite taken over 15 years ago.

The next one is truely incredible

Saturn’s Hyperion: A Moon with Odd Craters

Explanation : What lies at the bottom of Hyperion’s strange craters? Nobody knows. To help find out, the robot Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn swooped past the sponge-textured moon in late 2005 and took an image of unprecedented detail. That image, shown above in false color, shows a remarkable world strewn with strange craters and a generally odd surface. The slight differences in color likely show differences in surface composition. At the bottom of most craters lies some type of unknown dark material. Inspection of the image shows bright features indicating that the dark material might be only tens of meters thick in some places. Hyperion is about 250 kilometers across, rotates chaotically, and has a density so low that it might house a vast system of caverns inside.

Largest Full Moon of 2008

Explanation : As viewed from a well chosen location at sunset, October’s gorgeous Full Moon rose behind Mount Hamilton, east of San Jose, California. Captured in this lovely telescopic view, historic Lick Observatory is perched on the mountain’s 4,200 foot summit, observatory and rising Moon momentarily sharing the warm color of filtered sunlight.

Milky Way Road Trip

Explanation : In search of planets and the summer Milky Way, astronomer Tunç Tezel took an evening road trip. Last Saturday, after driving the winding road up Uludag, a mountain near Bursa, Turkey, he was rewarded by this beautiful skyview to the south. Near the center, bright planet Jupiter outshines the city lights below and the stars of the constellation Sagittarius. Above the mountain peaks, an arcing cloud bank seems to lead to the Milky Way’s own cloudy apparition plunging into the distant horizon. In Turkish, Uludag means Great Mountain. Uludag was known in ancient times as the Mysian Olympus.

Examining objects and phenomena in space such as nebulae, galaxies and comets is Astronomy. Some people do it for a living, others just to pass the time. Thus whenever an astronomy picture of the day is offered to people, they grab it. There are plenty of such pictures to choose from, and plenty of interesting objects out there to keep people looking.

NASA is a great source to find and astronomy picture of the day. There’s a new image there every day. There’s also another section that shows videos and images. This could be an excellent source for images and videos for your own daily updated site. November 5, 2008 showed a close view of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. The photo was taken by a passing spacecraft. The image is crisp enough to see a small bus, if there were one on the moon. One interesting characteristic 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.

June 16, 1995 the first astronomy photo of the day NASA was online. It was a what if image of the Earth posing as a neutron star. This photo was created by the computer. The most interesting feature is that the constellation Orion is visible twice. Even light from behind a neutron star is visible because the dense star bends the light all the way around it. 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. This area is normally invisible because of the dust obscuring it. But COBE’s infrared imaging captured this amazing image.

The astronomy picture of the day was the same on January 1, 2000 and January 1, 2001. That’s because most people conceive the year 2000 was the first year of the new millennium. However the third millennium actually began 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