Top 10 Astronomy Images of 2006

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."

Comments

A few others

[Salvance]

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

Best one has shuttle and ISS in front of the Sun

[Anonymous Coward]

And Mr. Legault lost the sight in one eye to snap that one at the perfect moment showing true commitment.

Heh.

[Black Parrot]

"That's no face, it's a butte!"

(Oh, admit it - we're all juvenile here.)

Saturn photo

[NthDegree256]

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.

Re:Saturn photo

[CheshireCatCO]

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.)

Re:Not sure about #9

[The Bad Astronomer]

Heh. Oval BA was in my "Runners Up" list. If I have time tonight I'll put up a second page with 5 more images I like, though more likely it'll be next week.

Best = most aesthetically pleasing

[syousef]

I've studied Astronomy at Masters level. I'm glad an Astronomer put these together instead of just some random artist who would have just picked the most pretty ones. There's still some leaning towards the aesthetic mind you - and there's a lot of science that isn't spectacular but is revolutionary none the less. Number 9 and number 5 are the least scientifically interesting to me, though artistically/photographically and from the point of view of timing I can see why they were included.

I'm not surprised at quality here though. Bad Astronomy is an awesome web site.