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Astronomy Picture Of the Day (APOD)
3D Mercury Transit
25.11.2006
Mercury is now visible shortly before dawn, the brightest "star" just above the eastern horizon. But almost two weeks ago Mercury actually crossed the face of the Sun for the second time in the 21st century.
Alpha Cam: Runaway Star
24.11.2006
Runaway stars are massive stars traveling rapidly through interstellar space. Like a ship plowing through cosmic seas, runaway star Alpha Cam has produced this graceful arcing bow wave or bow shock - moving at over 60 kilometers per second and compressing the interstellar material in its path.
Hydrogen in M33
23.11.2006
Gorgeous spiral galaxy M33 seems to have more than its fair share of hydrogen. Its inner 30,000 light-years are shown here in an image processed to fully reveal the reddish glow of ionized hydrogen regions (HII regions) sprawling along loose spiral arms as they wind toward the galaxy's core.
A Bucket Wheel Excavator on Earth
22.11.2006
Please wait while one of the largest mobile machines in the world crosses the road. The machine pictured above is a bucket-wheel excavator used in modern surface mining. Machines like this have given humanity the ability to mine minerals and change the face of planet Earth in new and dramatic ways.
A Leonid Meteor Over Sweden
21.11.2006
This past weekend, small remnant bits of a distant comet lit up the skies over much of planet Earth. Incoming reports, however, have this year's Leonid meteor shower as less active than Leonid meteor showers a few years ago.
M42: Wisps of the Orion Nebula
20.11.2006
The Great Nebula in Orion, an immense, nearby starbirth region, is probably the most famous of all astronomical nebulas. Here, glowing gas surrounds hot young stars at the edge of an immense interstellar molecular cloud only 1500 light-years away. In the above deep image, faint wisps and sheets of dust and gas are particularly evident.
The Car, the Hole, and the Peekskill Meteorite
19.11.2006
The Peekskill meteor of 1992 was captured on 16 independent videos and then struck a car. Documented as brighter than the full Moon, the spectacular fireball crossed parts of several US states during its 40 seconds of glory before landing in Peekskill, New York.
Leonids and Leica
18.11.2006
This lovely view from northern Spain at Cape Creus on the easternmost point of the Iberian peninsula, looks out across the Mediteranean and up into the stream of the 2002 Leonid meteor shower. The picture is a composite of thirty separate one minute exposures taken through a fisheye lens.
Hand Drawn Transit
17.11.2006
The sight of Mercury's tiny round disk drifting slowly across the face of the Sun inspired and entertained many denizens of planet Earth last week. In fact, artist and astronomer Mark Seibold viewed...
Children of the Sun
16.11.2006
For a moment, planets Jupiter, Venus, Mars, and Mercury all posed near their parent star in this Sun-centered view, recorded on November 11. The picture, from a coronograph onboard the space-based SOlar Heliospheric Observatory, spans 15 degrees with the Sun's size and position indicated by the white circle.
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