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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."

2 of 75 comments (clear)

  1. 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.)