Stumbled across this website today (thanks to johnclimber).

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html

Basically 15 years worth of daily photos of the incredible beauty of the universe. How about Orion?

Or Saturn’s sponge-like moon, Hyperion?

Maybe the evocatively-named Pillars of Creation

Who needs religion?

http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/

Who needs religion?

We need proper aliens …

🙄

GFs dad works for NASA, he sends me links APOD links regularly. This is my favourite

“Who needs religion?” – not God!

Photos are amazing! Chance is a fine thing!! 🙂

my fave

What have NASA redacted from the Pillars of Creation image? Aliens? God?

Dust and gas mostly, I expect.

If any of you have Android phones there’s an App that sets these pics as your background each day.

Probably my fave app 🙂

https://market.android.com/details?id=com.blork.anpod&feature=search_result

NASA solves religion question.

So now that that’s out of the way, can we please just enjoy the photos?

Not wishing to put a dampener on this thread, and I may have got it wrong, but aren’t most of those star cloud type pictures taken with radio telescopes and then coloured in by computer ?
Still impressive stuff though.

The image of the space station passing infront of the sun during an eclipse Is one of my faves.

Never mind all that fancy stuff, an amateur captured this picture of the shuttle docking with the ESS from his garden with a DSLR and an old telescope. Ace!

From metro.co.uk

Spotted this yesterday on New Scientist;

Click for details
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EDIT: Bah…. too slow…

Getting such a shot was ‘the holy grail of International Space Station imaging’, said the 40-year-old from the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire.

The IT manager..

Ooh I bet he’s a member on here.

If your posting pics like those of the pillar they need facts to go with them to give them true justice.

The tower of gas that can be seen coming off the nebula is approximately 57 trillion miles (97 trillion km) high.

Not wishing to put a dampener on this thread, and I may have got it wrong, but aren’t most of those star cloud type pictures taken with radio telescopes and then coloured in by computer ?
Still impressive stuff though.

Yup – I think so. Lots of sophisticated techniques used to render images in the visible-light spectrum

“In this mosaic of broadband telescopic images, additional image data acquired with a narrow hydrogen alpha filter was used to bring out the pervasive tendrils of energized atomic hydrogen gas and the arc of the giant Barnard’s Loop.”

Not yer average dSLR…

Ghost Head nebula