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Top 10 Astronomy Images of 2006

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the eye-in-the-sky dept.

The Bad Astronomer writes "Astronomical observatories on the ground and in space return many terabytes of data every year. But which bytes are the best? I combed through thousands of pictures to find the Top 10 astronomy images of the year."

7 of 75 comments (clear)

  1. A few others by Salvance · · Score: 4, Informative

    Some of these were pretty good, but I would have liked to see some better shots ... I personally found Top 10 Best Space Stories of 2006 more interesting, and some of the pics in Most Amazing Galactic Images ever were pretty good too.

    Here's a couple other pics that I thought were top 10 material:
    Man in space
    Earth from Satellite

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  2. Saturn photo by NthDegree256 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Many of these were amazing - the sheer scale of some of these images never fails to floor me. The Saturn photo at the end, however, truly sent shivers down my spine at how beautiful it was. Naturally, I was crushed to find that the link to the larger version wasn't working.

    Luckily, the copy on APoD works fine. I thought I'd post it here in case someone else, like me, was looking to make a desktop out of this amazing photo.

    1. Re:Saturn photo by CheshireCatCO · · Score: 5, Informative

      It's basically true-color. I just asked the guy who put the mosaic together and he used some IR and UV filters so it isn't strictly exactly "true" color in that sense, but it is calibrated so all of the colors are balanced to their correct values so that should be what your eye would see. (I think that that should make sense.) Mind you, the colors were not calibrated to research-grade tolerance since it's a diminishing return, so don't take everything as 100% accurate. (And yes, there are lens flares and probably other optics effects in the image.)

  3. More on the Saturn photo by Bromskloss · · Score: 3, Informative

    More on the Saturn photo

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  4. Re:A couple of stunning ones by lottameez · · Score: 2, Informative

    Tangential to the topic at hand, but I saw the Rover IMAX at the new Air & Space museum out by Dulles. Spirit & Opportunity are an amazing technical and engineering achievement. I remember seeing this picture with the rover a few months ago but they didn't have the zoomed in version so I couldn't tell what was a rock and what was a rover (seems like there's a song in there somewheres).

    BTW, the rest of that museum is totally like mecca for any nerd.

    -1 Rambling.

    --
    Yeah? Well I think you're overrated too.
  5. Re:A couple of stunning ones by Tablizer · · Score: 3, Informative

    I was shocked by photos showing the rover. The rovers aren't that big so the resolution was amazing. I'd love to see some shots of the "tree" formation like that. The general belief is the are some form of ice crystals but they must be amazing looking. They were quite large on the lower res shots.

    I assume you are talking about these:

    http://mmmgroup.altervista.org/e-trees.html

    The new orbiter is about 5-to-10 times clearer than the one that took those "tree" photos. It has a big-ass camera, so if it can get over the right area of Mars, we could have splended images of those "ice trees".

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  6. Mirrors of PNG and TIFF by nwhitehorn · · Score: 2, Informative

    For those of you wanting high quality and a connection that works:

    http://banshee.uchicago.edu/~nathanw/2230_6163_2.p ng
    http://banshee.uchicago.edu/~nathanw/2230_6163_3.t if