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Astronomy Picture Of the Day (APOD)
Mars in the New Year
6.01.2000
Many will long remember where they were and what they were doing when the calendar rolled over to the year 2000. On Mars, of course, that date was nothing special and the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft continued with business as usual - systematically recording images of the Red Planet from orbit.
Earth, Moon, Hubble
5.01.2000
The Space Shuttle Discovery Crew was fortunate enough to witness one of the brighter full moon's from orbit two weeks ago during their mission to fix the Hubble Space Telescope. Pictured...
Galaxies Cluster Toward the Great Attractor
4.01.2000
Galaxies dot the sky like jewels in the direction of a mass so large it is known simply as the Great Attractor. The galaxies pictured above are part of a cluster of galaxies called ACO 3627 near the center of the Great Attractor.
Cas A Supernova Remnant in X Rays
3.01.2000
The complex shell of a star seen to explode 300 years ago is helping astronomers to understand how that star exploded. The above recently released image of supernova remnant Cassiopeia A (Cas A) shows unprecedented detail in three X-ray colors.
The Largest Rock Known
2.01.2000
There, that faint dot in the center - that's the largest rock known. It is larger than every known asteroid, moon, and comet nucleus. It is larger than any other rocky planet. (Nobody knows...
The Millennium that Defines Universe
1.01.2000
Welcome to the millennial year at the threshold of millennium three. During millennium two, humanity continually redefined its concept of "Universe": first as spheres centered on the Earth, in mid-millennium as the Solar System, a few centuries ago as the Galaxy, and within the last century as the matter emanating from the Big Bang.
The Millennium that Defined Earth
31.12.1999
When the second millennium began, people generally knew that the Earth was round, but few saw much of it beyond their local village. As the millennium progressed, humans mapped the continents, circumnavigated the globe, and determined the composition of the Earth.
The Century that Defined Galaxy
30.12.1999
As the twentieth century dawned a debate raged over whether the Milky Way was the entire universe. The 1920s brought observations of spiral-nebulae that housed familiar but faint variable stars, and hence placed these nebulae much farther than anything else ever found. The Milky Way, apparently, is itself a spiral nebula seen from the inside.
The Decade that Defined Star System
29.12.1999
As the 1990s began, the only planetary star system known was our own Solar System. The first extra-solar star system was discovered orbiting a pulsar in 1991. Slight changes in the precise arrival times of the pulses from the central small dense neutron star gave evidence of orbiting planets.
A Year of New Perspectives
28.12.1999
Fittingly, 1999 saw a decade of astronomical discoveries to an end with portents of things to come - embodied in new spacecraft, telescopes, and perspectives to explore the distant Universe across the electromagnetic spectrum. X-ray astronomy in particular will likely flourish in coming
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