Astronomy picture of the day!

Gazing skyward on a sunny day in May, photographer Jean-Marc Lecleire captured this engaging display of ice halos forming complete circles in the sky. Recorded with a fish-eye lens from a spot near the grand Château de Chambord in France, the picture looks straight up, spanning almost 180 degrees from horizon to horizon.

The Phoenix lander's footpads are about the size of a dinner plate. One of three is shown at the right, covered with Martian soil after a successful soft landing on the Red Planet on May 25 2008.

Astronomical Pics are usually breath-taking. Do posts more good pics regularly Evening. Keep it up bro.

The Spitzer Space Telescope's encompasing infrared view of the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy is hard to appreciate in just one picture. In fact, more than 800,000 frames of data from Spitzer's cameras have now been pieced to together in an enormous mosaic of the galactic plane - the most detailed infrared picture of our galaxy ever made. The small portion seen here spans nearly 8 degrees, roughly the apparent width of your fist held at arms length, across the galaxy's center. The full mosaic is 120 degrees wide.

looks like somebody spilling dots and paints over a blue endless infinity. Beautiful...

ummm
amazing
keep it up
post more

A Fire Rainbow Over New Jersey



What is that inverted rainbow in the sky? Sometimes known as a fire rainbow for its flame-like appearance, a circumhorizon arc is created by ice, not fire. For a circumhorizon arc to be visible, the Sun must be at least 58 degrees high in a sky where cirrus clouds are present. Furthermore, the numerous, flat, hexagonal ice-crystals that compose the cirrus cloud must be aligned horizontally to properly refract sunlight like a single gigantic prism. Therefore, circumhorizon arcs are quite unusual to see.

this is a WOW! amazing!

A View to the Sunset




Each day on planet Earth can have a dramatic ending as the Sun sets below the colorful western horizon. Often inspiring, or offering a moment for contemplation, a sunset is perhaps the single most photographed celestial event.

GLAST (Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope) leaves for Space

An Intercontinental Data Grid for Astronomy






As telescope technologies improve, the amount of data astronomers are gathering is growing exponentially, giving rise to major data management challenges. To handle their data, the NSF-supported National Optical Astronomy Observatory Science Archive uses a continent-spanning data grid based on the Storage Resource Broker system developed at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego. The archive holds some 15 terabytes of astronomical data in more than 800,000 files distributed across three sites in Arizona (NOAO/Tucson), Illinois (NCSA), and Chile (NOAO/CTIO). This mosaic of images of the Large Magellanic Cloud—the breeding ground for new stars and cemetery for dead stars—will form part of the archive.

Star Power






The brightest stellar explosion ever recorded was seen by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ground-based optical telescopes. The discovery indicates that violent explosions of extremely massive stars were relatively common in the early universe and a similar explosion could be ready to go off in our own galaxy. This new supernova may offer a rare glimpse of how the first stars died. It is unprecedented to find such a massive star and witness its death. The discovery of the supernova, known as SN 2006gy, provided evidence that the deaths of such massive stars are fundamentally different from theoretical predictions.

Sometimes both heaven and Earth erupt. In Iceland in 1991, the volcano Hekla erupted at the same time that auroras were visible overhead. Hekla, one of the most famous volcanoes in the world, has erupted at least 20 times over the past millennium, sometimes causing great destruction. The last eruption occurred only six years ago but caused only minor damage. The green auroral band occurred fortuitously about 100 kilometers above the erupting lava.

Few astronomical sights excite the imagination like the nearby stellar nursery known as the Orion Nebula. The Nebula's glowing gas surrounds hot young stars at the edge of an immense interstellar molecular cloud only 1500 light-years away. The Great Nebula in Orion can be found with the unaided eye just below and to the left of the easily identifiable belt of three stars in the popular constellation Orion. The above image from the 3.6-meter Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope atop a dormant volcano in Hawaii brings out Orion's detail in spectacular fashion. Buried in the complex nebulosity are the bright stars of the Trapezium in Orion's heart, the sweeping lanes of dark dust that cross the center, the pervasive red glowing hydrogen gas, and the blue tinted dust that reflects the light of newborn stars. The whole Orion Nebula cloud complex, which includes the Horsehead Nebula, will slowly disperse over the next 100,000 years.

Have you ever heard an aurora? Or a black hole? Have you ever filled your screen with the fireworks of the final frontier? Help yourself to the biggest pictures and the coolest sounds from space.


The site to hear the sound is
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/06/27/1172849.aspx

Dust Mountains in the Carina Nebula

An Enceladus Tiger Stripe from Cassini