Здесь приведена подборка лучших картинок, опубликованных в APOD'ах в 2008 г. Отбор, конечно, был субъективным, но картинки все-равно красивые. Списки объектов, из которых мы делали выбор, вы можете увидеть по ссылкам. C Новым Годом. Редакция Астронет.

Сегодня Астрономической картинке дня исполняется 30 лет. Чтобы отметить эту дату, сегодняшняя картинка создана из 1836 фотографий, опубликованных за последние 5 лет. Эти снимки использованы как 32232 элемента мозаики, вместе составившие знаменитую картину Ван Гога "Звездная ночь". Сегодня Астрономическая картинка дня выражает искреннюю благодарность своим авторам, волонтерам и читателям.

The Whirlpool Galaxy is a classic spiral galaxy. At only 30 million light years distant and fully 60 thousand light years across, M51, also known as NGC 5194, is one of the brightest and most picturesque galaxies on the sky.

What's happening to this meteor? It is shedding its outer layers as it passes through the Earth's atmosphere and heats up. The sudden high temperatures not only cause the bright glow along the dramatic streak but also melt and vaporize the meteor's component rock and ice, creating dust.

Is there a monster in IC 1396? Known to some as the Elephant's Trunk Nebula, parts of gas and dust clouds of this star formation region may appear to take on foreboding forms, some nearly human. The only real monster here, however, is a bright young star too far from Earth to hurt us.

The night side of Pluto spans this shadowy scene. In the stunning spacebased perspective, the Sun is 4.9 billion kilometers (almost 4.5 light-hours) behind the dim and distant world. It was captured by far flung New Horizons in July of 2015 when the spacecraft was at a range of some 21,000 kilometers from Pluto.

Do any shapes seem to jump out at you from this interstellar field of stars and dust? The jeweled expanse, filled with faint, starlight-reflecting clouds, drifts through the night in the royal constellation of Cepheus.

Yes, but can your sunset do this? Looking west from Tucson, Arizona, USA one day last month, the sunset sky looked strange when it briefly lit up with the plume of a rocket launched from California a few minutes earlier.

How many bright tails does Comet Lemmon have? Two. In the featured image it appears to have three, but why? The reason is that the zigzagging brown filament is a persistent meteor train that by luck appeared in front of the distant comet C/2025 A6 (Lemmon).

Does the road to our galaxy's center go through Monument Valley? It doesn't have to, but if your road does -- take a picture. In this case, the road is US Route 163 and iconic buttes on the Navajo National Reservation populate the horizon.