Astronomy picture of the day…
2009 September 25
Gigagalaxy Zoom: Galactic Center
Credit: ESO / Stéphane Guisard - Copyright: Stéphane Guisard
Explanation: From Sagittarius to Scorpius, the central Milky Way is a truly beautiful part of planet Earth’s night sky. The gorgeous region is captured here, an expansive gigapixel mosaic of 52 fields spanning 34 by 20 degrees in 1200 individual images and 200 hours of exposure time. Part of ESO’s Gigagalaxy Zoom Project, the images were collected over 29 nights with a small telescope under the exceptionally clear, dark skies of the ESO Paranal Observatory in Chile. The breathtaking cosmic vista shows off intricate dust lanes, bright nebulae, and star clusters scattered through our galaxy’s rich central starfields. Starting on the left, look for the Lagoon and Trifid nebulae, the Cat’s Paw, the Pipe dark nebula, and the colorful clouds of Rho Ophiuchi and Antares (right).
I will to to update this thread daily. There are some really cool images that come through.
2009 August 24
Morning Glory Clouds Over Australia
Credit & Licence: Mick Petroff; Tip Thanks: James Holmes (Cairns)
Explanation: What causes these long, strange clouds? No one is sure. A rare type of cloud known as a Morning Glory cloud can stretch 1,000 kilometers long and occur at altitudes up to two kilometers high. Although similar roll clouds have been seen at specific places across the world, the ones over Burketown, Queensland Australia occur predictably every spring. Long, horizontal, circulating tubes of air might form when flowing, moist, cooling air encounters an inversion layer, an atmospheric layer where air temperature atypically increases with height. These tubes and surrounding air could cause dangerous turbulence for airplanes when clear. Morning Glory clouds can reportedly achieve an airspeed of 60 kilometers per hour over a surface with little discernible wind. Pictured above, photographer Mick Petroff photographed some Morning Glory clouds from his airplane near the Gulf of Carpentaria, Australia.
Meteorological photographs of the day would be a proper thread title.
Even though it’s illegal I’d love to do multiple barrel rolls over those morning glory clouds.
Looks like someone beat me to it, but in a hang glider
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMdyT-rIXao
Dang.. YouTube link!
Got lost searching RedBull vids for 2hrs. I love/hate youtube.
Bahahah being sidetracked on youtube….....biggest time-killer out there
I get way too distracted on youtube… but you always find some cool/interesting videos to send to friends
Cheers for putting all the great pics up Jez, its interesting to now and again be made aware of how small ones life is in comparison to the wider scheme of things, well once in a while anyway.
I thought it was time to start up this thread again… 
2010 April 20
Saturn’s Moons Dione and Titan from Cassini
Credit: NASA/JPL/SSI; Color composite: Emily Lakdawalla
Explanation: What would it be like to see a sky with many moons? Such is the sky above Saturn. When appearing close to each other, moons will show a similar phase. A view with two of the more famous moons of Saturn in gibbous phase was captured last month by the robot spacecraft Cassini now orbiting Saturn. Titan, on the left, is among the largest moons in the Solar System and is perpetually shrouded in clouds. In 2005, the Huygens probe landed on Titan and gave humanity its first view of its unusual surface. Dione, on the right, has less than a quarter of Titan’s diameter and has no significant atmosphere. The above uncalibrated image was taken on April 10 after Cassini swooped by each moon the previous week.
2010 April 21
Wide Angle: The Cat’s Paw Nebula
Credit: ESO, DSS2
Explanation: Nebulae are perhaps as famous for being identified with familiar shapes as perhaps cats are for getting into trouble. Still, no known cat could have created the vast Cat’s Paw Nebula visible in Scorpius. At 5,500 light years distant, Cat’s Paw is an emission nebula with a red color that originates from an abundance of ionized hydrogen atoms. Alternatively known as the Bear Claw Nebula or NGC 6334, stars nearly ten times the mass of our Sun have been born there in only the past few million years. Pictured above, a wide angle, deep field image of the Cat’s Paw nebula was culled from the second Digitized Sky Survey.
2010 April 22
Venus, Mercury, and Moon
Credit & Copyright: Pete Lawrence (Digital-Astronomy)
Explanation: Earlier this month, Venus and Mercury climbed into the western twilight, entertaining skygazers around planet Earth in a lovely conjunction of evening stars. Combining 8 images spanning April 4 through April 15, this composite tracks their progress through skies above Portsmouth, UK. Each individual image was captured at 19:50 UT. The sequential path for both bright planets begins low and to the left. But while Venus continues to swing away from the setting Sun, moving higher above the western horizon, Mercury first rises then falls. Its highest point is from the image taken on April 11. Of course on April 15, Venus and Mercury were joined by a young crescent Moon.
2010 April 23
SDO: The Extreme Ultraviolet Sun
Credit: NASA / Goddard / SDO AIA Team
Explanation: Don’t panic, the Sun has not gone wild. But this wild-looking portrait of the nearest star to planet Earth was made on March 30th by the recently launched Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). Shown in false-color, the composite view covers extreme ultraviolet wavelengths and traces hot plasma at temperatures approaching 1 million kelvins. At full resolution, SDO image data is intended to explore solar activity in unprecedented detail. In fact, SDO will send 1.5 terabytes of data back each day, equivalent to a daily download of about half a million MP3 songs. New SDO data releases include a high-resolution movie of the large, eruptive prominence seen along the solar limb at the upper left.
2010 April 26
Dust Pillar of the Carina Nebula
Credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Livio and the Hubble 20th Anniversary Team (STScI)
Explanation: Inside the head of this interstellar monster is a star that is slowly destroying it. The monster, on the right, is actually an inanimate pillar of gas and dust that measures over a light year in length. The star, not itself visible through the opaque dust, is bursting out partly by ejecting energetic beams of particles. Similar epic battles are being waged all over the star-forming Carina Nebula. The stars will win in the end, destroying their pillars of creation over the next 100,000 years, and resulting in a new open cluster of stars. The pink dots around the image are newly formed stars that have already been freed from their birth monster. The above image was released last week in commemoration of the Hubble Space Telescopes 20th year of operation. The technical name for the stellar jets are Herbig-Haro objects. How a star creates Herbig-Haro jets is an ongoing topic of research, but it likely involves an accretion disk swirling around a central star. A second impressive Herbig-Haro jet occurs diagonally near the image center.
That doesn’t even look real.
It could almost be a painting.
2010 April 28
Sunset on a Golden Sea
Image Credit & Copyright: Pete Lawrence (Digital-Astronomy)
Explanation: On April 17, the sky was clear and the Sun’s colour was spectacular as night approached. This striking telescopic view even captures the Sun’s swollen and distorted shape from the southern coast of the UK. Reflecting a bright column of sunlight, the sea also appears golden, with the horizon marked by the city of Portsmouth. Were the colours made more intense by volcanic dust? Maybe not. Normally, sunset (and sunrise) colours can still be very dramatic, especially when the atmosphere is clear and the Sun is viewed very near the horizon, as in this scene. But large dust particles, like those in the airline-thwarting ash clouds from the erupting Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull, tend to create diffuse and subdued sunset colours.
more people should post on here! i have saved like 5 of these pics but everytime i try and find some for myself they are all crap ones haha
Far out rider, where do you get the time to find all these pictures.
One of my favourites was on display at UWA a couple of years ago, it was a 5 story hanging that showed (on a logarithmic scale) the time scale of the universe as seen from earth. It was put up in our Chemistry building and showed a lot of the known universe and how far back in time we are seeing it, relatively speaking of course.