Posted on 12/23/2013 11:57:19 AM PST by lbryce
I love astronomy. I have my whole life. Part of that is the wonder and awe it generates, learning about the Universe and our place in it.
But of course, there is great beauty in the skies as well. From our nearest neighbors to the most distant galaxies, the cosmos is a wonder to behold. Every year I collect my favorite pictures—chosen both for their beauty and their importance to science—and put them together in a gallery to delight your brain (you’ll find links to previous galleries at the end of this article). Picking only a few is always a herculean task, but I hope the ones on this list affect you the same way they did me.
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
Make sure you click on the "Higher-resolution Photo Original Blog Post" link that accompanies each image.
bkmark
Nah, didn't you hear? It's just a random collection of "stuff".
Bookmark
. . . Missed one.... Merry Christmas
God breathed the stars into the heavens. It was a simple task for Him. Our sun is a speck in the sky compared to the stars Betelgeuse and Canis Majoris. We cannot wrap our heads around how big He is!!!
The universe is one beautiful place. By the way whenever I see your post I’m thinking Bryce Fractals which are really cool and remind me of astronomical pictures.
ping ping ping
The original photo shows a star about to go nova...so the huge nebula of gas and dust would have been obliterated by now.
Aren’t most of those beautiful “pictures” actually false color?
I actually posted an article within the last few months that addresses the really strange aspect of how the “pillars of creation” as they were called had already vanished when at the very moment we were first being astounded by it all. The huge distances involved and the limitations on the speed in which light can travel created the strange set of circumstances of what we were observing at the moment was not even there anymore.
Yes, I believe so.
Actually EVERYTHING you see is how it used to look. Some of it looks like it did a fraction of a second ago and in the case of the Eagle Nebula what we see happened about 7000 years ago. I’m in awe every time I look into the night sky and realize I’m looking back in time! We’ll never know what the universe currently looks like because the scale only allows us to see what it did look like. Truly mind boggling.
And of course those "some" things would be anything within 186,000 miles, as that is how far light travels in a second. It takes light about 1-1/4 seconds to get to us from the moon. Of the 8 planets, Venus gets the closest at 23-25 million miles (when it is between the Sun and Earth). That's about 2 light minutes. The nearest star, outside of the Sun, is about 50 trillion miles, or 4-1/3 light years away. The Sun, at around 93 million miles, is 8 light minutes from Earth.
Each color of light represents a specific frequency of the electromagnetic spectrum. In some of these cases the color is real but intensified to allow us to see them, as they are impossibly faint to the naked eye or even through a telescope. In other cases, totally false colors must be added in order to display any image at all. This is usually when the image is in frequencies other than normal optical light. Frequencies such as Radio, Ultraviolet, Infrared, Gamma, etc.
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