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Astronomy Picture Of the Day (APOD)
Hypatia of Alexandria
12.01.2002
Sixteen hundred years ago, Hypatia became one of the world's leading scholars in mathematics and astronomy. Hypatia's legendary knowledge, modesty, and public speaking ability flourished during the era of the Great Library of Alexandria.
The Gamma Ray Sky
11.01.2002
What if you could see gamma rays? If you could, the sky would seem to be filled with a shimmering high-energy glow from the most exotic and mysterious objects in the Universe.
Sunbather
10.01.2002
Intense and overwhelming, the direct glare of the Sun is blocked by the smooth disk centered in this image from the sun-staring SOHO spacecraft. Taken on January 8, the picture shows streamers of solar wind billowing radially outward for millions of kilometers above the Sun's surface indicated by the white circle.
X Ray Milky Way
9.01.2002
If you had x-ray vision, the center regions of our galaxy would not be hidden from view by immense cosmic dust clouds opaque to visible light. Instead, the Milky Way toward Sagittarius might look something like this stunning mosaic of images from the orbiting Chandra Observatory.
Blue Flash
8.01.2002
Difficult to observe, the momentary green flash above the rising or setting sun has been documented as a phenomenon caused by the atmospheric bending or refraction of sunlight. Like a weak prism, the Earth's atmosphere breaks white sunlight into colors, bending red colors slightly and green and blue colors through increasingly larger angles.
Thackeray's Globules
7.01.2002
Rich star fields and glowing hydrogen gas silhouette dense, opaque clouds of interstellar gas and dust in this Hubble Space Telescope close-up of IC 2944, a bright star forming region in Centaurus, 5,900 light-years away. The largest of these dark globules, first spotted by South African astronomer A. D.
The Mysterious Cone Nebula
6.01.2002
Sometimes the simplest shapes are the hardest to explain. For example, the origin of the mysterious cone-shaped region seen on the far left remains a mystery. The interstellar formation, dubbed the Cone Nebula, is located about 2700 light years away.
M2 9: Wings of a Butterfly Nebula
5.01.2002
Are stars better appreciated for their art after they die? Actually, stars usually create their most artistic displays as they die. In the case of low-mass stars like our Sun and M2-9 pictured above, the stars transform themselves from normal stars to white dwarfs by casting off their outer gaseous envelopes.
Apollo 17 s Moonship
4.01.2002
Awkward and angular looking, Apollo 17's lunar module Challenger was designed for flight in the vacuum of space. This sharp picture from the command module America, shows Challenger's ascent stage in lunar orbit.
M16: Infrared Star Hunt
3.01.2002
The head of an interstellar gas and dust cloud is shown here in false-color, a near-infrared view recorded by astronomers hunting for stars within M16's Eagle Nebula. Made famous in a 1995 Hubble...
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