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Astronomy Picture Of the Day (APOD)
Unusual Silica Rich Soil Discovered on Mars
18.12.2007
You're rolling across Mars when you unexpectedly uncover some unusually light soil. You stop. You turn. You return to inspect the soil and find out it is almost purely silica -- the main ingredient in quartz and glass. Such soil has never been found on Mars before. What created this soil?
Saturn s Ancient Rings
17.12.2007
How old are Saturn's rings? No one is quite sure. One possibility is that the rings formed relatively recently in our Solar System's history, perhaps only about 100 million years ago when a moon-sized object broke up near Saturn.
The Holographic Principle
16.12.2007
Is this picture worth a thousand words? According to the Holographic Principle, the most information you can get from this image is about 3 x 10 65 bits for a normal sized computer monitor.
Mountains of Creation
15.12.2007
(xxxedit and linkxxx) This fantastic skyscape lies at the eastern edge of giant stellar nursery W5, about 7,000 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia. An infrared view from the Spitzer Space Telescope...
Apollo 17: Shorty Crater Panorama
14.12.2007
In December of 1972, Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt spent about 75 hours on the Moon in the Taurus-Littrow valley, while colleague Ronald Evans orbited overhead. This sharp panorama is digitally stitched together from pictures taken by Cernan as he and Schmitt roamed the valley floor.
T Tauri and Hind s Variable Nebula
13.12.2007
The orange star centered in this remarkable telescopic skyview is T Tauri, protoytpe of the class of T Tauri variable stars. Nearby it is a dusty yellow cosmic cloud historically known as Hind's Variable Nebula (aka NGC 1555/1554).
Mars Rover Races to Survive
12.12.2007
The Martian rover Spirit is now in the race of its life. The rolling robot is trying to reach an outpost to spend the winter, but it keeps getting bogged down in soft sand on Mars.
The Universe Nearby
11.12.2007
What does the universe nearby look like? This plot shows over one and a half million of the brightest stars and galaxies in the nearby universe detected by the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) in infrared light.
A Jet from the Sun
10.12.2007
What powers the solar wind? Our Sun is known to emit a powerful wind of particles with gusts that can even affect astronauts and satellites orbiting Earth. The cause of the solar wind...
The Fairy of Eagle Nebula
9.12.2007
The dust sculptures of the Eagle Nebula are evaporating. As powerful starlight whittles away these cool cosmic mountains, the statuesque pillars that remain might be imagined as mythical beasts. Pictured above is one of several striking dust pillars of the Eagle Nebula that might be described as a gigantic alien fairy.
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