RECENT ASTRONOMY PHOTOS 8/2015 [EXPANDED]

Hold your hats because this (above) is a much more significant picture than it seems. It's the Andromeda Galaxy, AKA M31, as seen recently on a clear night over the Swiss Alps. "So what?" you say. "What's so special about this?"

The answer is that we've all seen good pictures of M31 taken with the aid of long  exposures, pictures like the small colorful one above,...but the large picture at the top was taken with an ordinary camera. It's what the naked eye would have seen. In other words, the rounded disk of another galaxy was visible to the unaided eye in the night sky over Switzerland, not as a pinpoint of light, but as a hazy blue disk with a bright center. It'll be visible in American skies starting in September and lasting through the Fall. Amazing, eh?

Here's (above) a shot taken from the Curiosity Rover on Mars. The camera was about four feet high.

Above, layered Martian rocks, also taken by Curiosity. The layers are believed to be deposits made a couple of billion years ago near the shore of an ancient, long-gone river.

Here (above) a comet has just "turned on" as its orbit takes it closest to the Sun.

Lastly, here's (above) a small cluster of galaxies which is independent of our own Local Group of galaxies.

Our own group is a much larger one consisting of 54 galaxies, many of them dwarf galaxies that orbit the two local giants, Andromeda and The Milky Way.  According to Wikipedia the center of our local group is a point between these two galaxies.