Astronomy Pictures

Astronomy is the study of space objects such as planets, galaxies and stars. Some people do it for a living, others just to pass the time. That's why when a web site or magazine offers an astronomy picture of the day it's likely to attract a great deal of attention. There are plenty of such pictures to choose from, and plenty of interesting objects out there to keep people looking.The first place to look for and astronomy picture of the day is NASA's website. This site NASA.gov shows a new image each and every day. It also has a multimedia center with video and images. These could be great sources for a person to create their own site that offers a new image each day. On November 5, 2008, NASA's picture of the day was a close view of Saturn's moon, Enceladus. It was taken by the Cassini space craft as it passed about 1,700 kilometers from the surface. It gets down to details the size of the bus. One interesting feature of the ice on Enceladus is that it reflects 99% of the light that falls onto it. Talk about bright. The moon is so interesting that Cassini will continue to fly by for more images later in its mission.NASA maintains an archive of all the astronomy photos of the day dating all the way back to June 16 of 1995. It was a representation of the earth as if it were as dense as a neutron star. This photo was created by the computer. It shows Orion visible twice. That's because a neutron star is dense enough to bend light from behind it to the front of it. This distortion causes double images of some objects.September 8, 1995 brought a very interesting image of the central part of our own Milky Way galaxy from the NASA COBE Satellite. This image would normally not be visible because the dust in the galaxy obscures it in the visible spectrum. But COBE scans in infrared, so produced the amazing image of our very symmetrical galaxy.The astronomy picture of the day was the same on January 1, 2000 and January 1, 2001. That's because most people believe the year 2000 was the first year of the new millennium. However the third millennium actually began on January 1, 2001.