November 30, 2003

The astronomy picture of the day, as brought to you by the folk at NASA. Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
posted by the_bone 20 years ago
  • I love this.
  • A lot of great pictures. Some of my favorites would be The Colorful Horsehead Nebula and A Beautiful Trifid. Great link!
  • This is my favourite. Maybe God doesn't like us after all.
  • This is one of the first sites I go to every day and my desktop pretty much always has one of their pictures on it.
  • I'm with certainsome1. I go here every day to get my science nerd itch scratched.
  • Wow.
  • I have the Horsehead Nebula one as my PC wallpaper - have had for over a month so it must be time for a change.
  • Yeah, definitely one of the top 10 sites on the Internet. It's non-commercial, it's gorgeous and you learn stuff. I always set it up as a start page. Incredibly, they've been doing this non-stop since 1995.
  • They have some great pictures of the auroras from the recent solar flares. I also like this one from the lunar eclipse last month.
  • A related site: the Great Images In NASA (GRIN) historical archive.
  • I've seen this site linked in other places, but it changes on a daily basis. (Hm, start of a poem there.) Anyway, if you haven't seen it, here it is.
  • Heh.
  • Oooh, good one!
  • that picture was my desktop for a long time, beeswacky!
  • I keep forgetting just how great APoD is. I've forgotten it for months, even years, several times now. It also sort of dumbfounds me that I can say something like that about the internets.
  • Hey, fractalid. Uh... Your mom is calling you. No, really. That mojave desert phone boot a few threads back was ringing and I picked it up and it was totally your mom. If you hurry back you catch her!
  • Don't listen to him man, he's trying to steer you away from the souvenir booth. I know it's up ahead somewhere.
  • Phew! Finally pulled myself away from that phonebooth thing. But now I'm lost and tired and cranky and my ice cream cone melted into the sand.
  • *hands Lara some tissue paper*
  • Great photo - love it.
  • Whoa! Now THAT is way way way cool.
  • That is now my desktop wallpaper.
  • Spectacular! Thanks for sharing that one, homunculus.
  • Can someone more versed in photography help me turn my bullshit-o-meter off? Every long exposure of stars and planets I've seen is either tracked with a moving equatorial mount or else ends up as a bunch of curved lines due to the earth's rotation. Obviously this image wasn't compensated or else the earthly features wouldn't be sharp. I see no possibility that this is a single exposure, as claimed.
  • I think you can turn off the BS meter. The photos you mention, showing the arcs of stars and such, are very long exposures (those types of results usually require several hours of exposure). The photo linked above, looks fairly representative of results that can be achieved with 30 second through several minute exposures.
  • I second sugarmilktea - I've got old film pictures that are pretty good at 30 second exposure, ISO 1600, minimal streaking. Use a shortish lens and that should keep streaking down even further. With recent SLRs being OK up past ISO 6400 equivalent(!!) it's quite feasible.
  • Oh, man!! Is that fantastic or what? I want to go camping on a clear night and stare up at the Milky Way. Haven't been all summer. I hate light pollution.
  • It is fantastic! This one is still my favorite, though.
  • Some people are just too darn lucky!!