Astronomy: Wallpaper
Astronomy is the study of the universe. Some astrologers practice it as a serious science while for others it is an educational hobby. For this reason, whenever an astronomy picture of the day is offered to the general public, people usually jump at the chance of looking at it. There are plenty of astronomical pictures to choose from, and plenty of interesting moons etc to keep people enthralled.
Of course ,NASA is one of the primary sources for an astronomy picture of the day. This site, NASA.gov, shows a new image each and every day. There is also a section that shows movies. These could be used to create your own photo site. Saturn’s moon Enceladus was the ‘star’ feature on November 5, 2008.
This footage was taken by a passing spacecraft. It can reproduce details the size of a bus. The ice on this moon reflects as glare, nearly 100% of all the sun light that reaches it. So you would need to wear sunglasses! This moon is so fascinating that Cassini will continue to fly by for more images later on in its mission.
NASA maintains an archive of all the astronomy footage of the day dating all the way back to June 16 of 1995. It was a ‘what if’ footage of the Earth posing as a neutron star. The image is a computer generation. The most interesting feature is that the constellation of Orion is visible twice. Even light from behind a neutron star is visible because the dense star bends the light around it. This causes some objects to be seen twice.
The entry for September 8th, 1995 was an amazing picture of the central part of the ‘Milky Way’ galaxy taken by NASA’s COBE satellite. This area is generally invisible because of the dust masking it. But COBE scans in infrared, so produced that amazing picture of our very symmetrical galaxy.
The astronomy picture of the day was the same on January 1st, 2000 and January 1st, 2001. The explanation why both dates shared this photo is that most people thought of the year 2000 as the first year of the third millennium.
However, the third millennium actually began on January 1st, 2001. NASA figured it was just better to just do it on both dates. apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap010101.html depicts man’s view of the solar system as it progressed from mere objects orbiting the Earth, all the way to the ‘Big Bang’ creating the universe as we know it today.
NASA has thousands more days with their very own unique astronomy picture of the day. Visit their web site, NASA.gov to see them.
