Astronomy Picture Of The Day
Astronomy is a study of outer space. 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 so many things to see, that browsing such images will never become boring.
The first place to look for and astronomy picture of the day is NASA’s website. This site NASA.gov shows a new image each and every day. There’s also another section that shows videos and images. These could be great sources for a person to create their own site that offers a new image each day. Saturn’s moon Enceladus was featured on November 5, 2008. It was taken by the Cassini space craft as it passed about 1,700 kilometers from the surface. It gets down to details the size of the bus. The ice on this moon reflects nearly 100% of all the light that hits it. Talk about snow blind. The plan is that Cassini will take more images of this moon 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. That image was of Earth as if it had the density of a neutron star. Of course the image is a computer simulation. One interesting element is that the constellation Orion in his visible twice. Even light from behind a neutron star is visible because the dense star bends the light all the way around it. This causes some double vision.
September 8, 1995 was an amazing image of the central part of the Milky Way galaxy taken by NASA’s COBE satellite. This image would normally not be visible because the dust in the galaxy obscures it in the visible spectrum. But COBE’s infrared imaging captured this amazing image.
January 1 in 2000 and 2001 had the very same astronomy picture of the day. The reason both dates shared this image is that most people considered the year 2000 as the first year of the third millennium. In reality January 1, 2001 was the beginning of millennium #3. Instead of arguing NASA used both dates. 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. You’ll find them on NASA’s website.