Astronomy Picture of the Day Archieve
Saturday, September 13th, 2008We are convinced that everybody should have a look at this site with its marvellous photographs of the earth, our planetary system, the galaxies and clusters of galaxies brought to the public by the NASA on a daily basis. Since 1995, this has been a free service of the North American Space Agency for the general public. They started publishing these great photos in June 1995 with an image called ‘Neutron Star Earth’, followed by the Pleiades Star Cluster, the Supernova 1987a Aftermath, Earth from Apollo 17, a Gamma Ray Sky Map, Jupiter from Voyager, the Spiral Galaxy M100, the Cat’s Eye Nebula, the Hooker Telescope on Mt. Wilson and ‘Ida and Dactyl: Asteroid and Moon’, and have been publishing a photo a day ever since.
They published the first photographs made by the famous Hubble Space Telescope and have brought amazing pictures to the eyes of amateurs and people somewhat interested in deep space phenomena. This month the looked into the archieve and published a photo of the Earth with transiting Moon taken from a distance of 50 million kilometers (31 million miles) by a probe sent to space in July 2005. A clever combination of different wavelengths and obtained a photo with surprising details of continents, oceans and clouds.
One of the galaxies
The NASA doesn’t limit the publications to just photos: they always include a little caption with interesting technical details of the photo or photographed object, including contextual links for further reading.
This site gets a full five stars our of five from us because of the beauty of the images, the simplicity of the page and because they don’t have any ads or commercials on their site. We wish there were more web sites like this one.
The Astronomy Picture of the Day is also available for inclusion into the sidebar of WordPress-Blogs and we certainly recommend it’s inclusion go to your plugin page and add it right away,
And just in case you don’t see the Astronomy Picture of the Day in the sidebar, just throw away your Internet Explorer and get a real browser: Firefox.
