Above, a kilometer high cliff on Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The largest boulders at the cliff bottom are about 20 meters wide. The photo was taken a few weeks ago by the Rosetta orbiter.
Here's an interesting photo (above). It's a composite picture of our galaxy's core taken by Hubble and the Spitzer X-ray telescope. The white splotch on the lower right is a star cluster surrounding Sagittarius A, the super massive black hole at the galactic center.
In case the wide photo showing the Sagittarius A cluster is obscured by my sidebar, here's (above) an unencumbered enlargement. There's a nearby cluster on the upper left, which is puzzling. How did it escape being ripped apart by Sag. A? And what are those rake marks on the upper right?
Here's (above) an old friend, the M16 star nursery taken by Hubble. You probably saw the 20 year old photo which is considered by many to have been Hubble's greatest achievement. This latest picture benefits from a wider field and a higher res.
Above, a nebula so close that it can be seen as a small fuzzy patch with the naked eye: The Great Nebula in Orion. It's the same nebula that contains the famous horse head, though I don't see it here. The image is a false color infrared composite taken by the Earth orbiting WISE observatory. Infrared allows us to see through dense clouds that previously obscured what we wanted to see. Boy, we sure got our money's worth with these orbiting telescopes!
3 comments:
Hi! I remember you once posted a really funny photo of a cartoonist at work, drawing someone with this wicked smile on her face, and you said this is what all caricaturists look like when they're drawing. I thought you might like this post, where you see a group of animators looking at themselves in a mirror as they mimic funny facial expressions, it made me think of you.
http://st1mu11.tumblr.com/post/108492276203
M: Wow! When you see them sequentially the pictures you linked to seemed to tell a story. Maybe I can get a blog post out of that. Many thanks!
The photos are amazing. They don't look real. They look like artists' renditions - fabulous paintings -- and give me a sense of how small and insignificant I am in the scheme of things, thus allowing me to feel justified in eating a chocolate chip cookie for breakfast.
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