APOD IS TWENTY

The Astronomy Picture of the Day is my home page. It is always fascinating, I usually learn something, and the pictures are marvelous. Today they celebrate their 20^th Birthday, so I thought I’d celebrate and show you a few of my favorite APOD pictures I’ve saved over the years. The telescope pictures of the galaxy are fascinating, but most of my 'keepers' are earthbound photos.

Of course, even “rocket scientists” can goof up. On May 8^th this year they tried to show what the rotating stars would look like in the year 14000 when Vega will have replaced Polaris as our North Star. The rotating stars will look no different to us because north is north here on planet Earth.

2009 June 23 Moon, Mercury, Jupiter and Mars

Aurora in the Lofotens

Big Blue Earth

Devil's Tower and the Milky Way

Eclipse over Rapa Nui

The Horsehead Nebula in Orion

Iceland Volcano Erupts

New York Hot Spot

An Unusual View of London

Saturn's New Rings

Perth, Australia - January 2007

Pileus Iridescent Clouds

The Shuttle Comes to New York

Stonehenge, where else? 

Thunder Cell Over Montana

Venus and the Moon

Titan, Dione, Pandora, and Little Pan

Winter in Yosemite

The APOD link above will change from day to day, this is their anniversary 

day page: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap150616.html

HALLOWEEN IN THE STARS

Halloween brings forth all manner of motifs, from the perky pumpkin patches to the creepy crawly creatures. Today I’m showing you something from the stars. Spiral arms and colliding galaxies – the stuff of sci-fi nightmares – this is Arp 272, some 450 million light-years away. 

Just think of how far that is. 

Boggles the mind, it does.

I first saw this particularly haunting photo on the 9/22/11 posting at APOD, the Astronomy Picture of the Day, NASA’s daily entry of fascinating photos.    Fortunately for us, unlike the botanists who classified and named living things in mundane Latin, the astronomers named things in the heavens using their vivid imaginations.  If you move your cursor over today’s APOD photo offering you will see just what I mean – the picture is chock full of spooky nebulae, (Ha! that’s Latin!) and Cousin Margaret is there too. You can check my blog posting, Sky Shots, for a glimpse of what APOD offers each day.

While your mind is being boggled at the distance of Arp 272 – remember that name, there’ll be a quiz later on in life – have a hauntingly Happy Halloween.

CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE

 

I might not be the center of the universe, not that I have the need to know exactly where that is, but I’ve several people dear to me who are the center of my universe.

As part of the preface to the video for June 6^th, APOD readers were asked to point out the slight inaccuracies in the video, like the supposed inaccuracy of the omission of Uranus, and there were many Comments.  Someone who was obviously not from this country criticized the Americans who commented on the video or pointed out the inaccuracies in it: “Basically they are simply unable to watch without interfering,” he said. And isn’t that what he did?

 

Well….. the vast majority of us who do see the video will be momentarily mind boggled, Uranus or not.  It’s a neat video to show most children over age five, and for those who do think they are the center of the universe it will put things in their proper perspective.