Dec 27 2006
Prev/Next Posts: « Moon Hoax Believers || Lenticular Clouds »
The Top Ten Astronomy Images of 2006
This past year has been — like most are — up and down for science in general and astronomy in particular. We’ve had stunning successes and heartbreaking setbacks, all of which seem huge when dealing with them at the time. But while the science of astronomy is many things, one of the more subtle yet deeply profound aspects of it is its ability to provide a sense of perspective.
The year’s end is a traditional time to look back and try to gain perspective on the events that occurred during this last circuit of the Sun. Astronomers have been hammering away at the sky, taking images that have profoundly pushed forward our understanding of the Universe. But there’s been more than that, too. They’ve slapped down some bad science — and deleting a negative is indeed a positive. They have also looked at old things in a new way, or new things in a new way, and even some new things in an old way.
With all this in mind, I decided to create my list of Best Astronomy Pictures of 2006. I went through hundreds of images (maybe thousands), checking NASA, APOD, the ESA, BAUT, and a few dozen amateur and professional sites featuring pictures as well. The criteria I kept in mind were beauty, of course, but also scientific value. But both of these could be trumped by the coolness factor. All three are subjective, but what the heck. It’s my blog. So here is what I came up with.
All the images below are hosted at Flickr, and they link to the original sites with higher resolution images (many of the pictures are suitable as wallpapers).
Remember, it’s my list. If you disagree, or you agree but don’t like my ordering, then post a comment! Let’s see what you think should have been here. Maybe I’ll post my runners-up list.
Number 10: The Comet and the Ring
A comet almost had to make this list, since they’re so darn pretty. But there was one this past year that, to me, was extra cool.
Periodic comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann (say that three times fast) was discovered in 1930, and in 1995 it was seen to have broken up into many pieces, most likely due to heating from the Sun. The fragments passed close by the Earth once again in May 2006, where many were easily visible through binoculars (I saw them myself, both through my binocs and my ’scope).
The comet was big, bright, and passed by many astronomical showpieces… including the famous Ring Nebula, a cloud of gas a light year across ejected by a dying star. When the two were close together, astronomers Paul Martinez & Philip Brents took this spectacular shot:
The Ring is the disk-shaped object in the upper left. Here’s a close-up of it:
A lot of images were taken of this pairing, many showing more detail and with the comet closer to the Ring, but this image speaks to me (in fact, it’s my desktop image at work). The scale is big– a lot of sky is in this shot, and it shows better the contrast in apparent size between the two objects. The comet looks bigger only because it’s so much closer: the Ring is actually about 10 trillion times bigger than the comet! But it’s a tad bit farther away.
Number 9: Painting the Eclipse
Lunar eclipses are fairly common: the Moon passes into the Earth’s shadow roughly once or twice per year on average. Since the Moon is bright and easy to photograph, there are zillions of lunar eclipse pictures available to view.
I thought I’d seen ‘em all, but then I saw this one and it floored me:
How cool and wonderful is that? The photographer, Laurent Laveder, set this image up very carefully, making sure that the model was placed just so when the Moon was just starting to be eaten by the circular edge of the Earth’s shadow. The result was this very clever tongue-in-cheek photo. I love it! He has many more images on his site worth checking out, too.
I also wrote about this image in September 2006, and have some more comments there.
Number 8: The Tarantula Writ Large
Our Milky Way Galaxy is a giant spiral collection of stars, gas, and dust. It has many smaller satellite galaxies, and one of them is the Large Magellanic Cloud, or LMC. The LMC is a fuzzy cloud-like object easily visible to the naked eye if you happen to be far enough south of the Equator (I saw it with my own eyes from Canberra, Australia in 2004). Through a telescope, though, the LMC is dominated by a cloud of gas called the Tarantula Nebula, perhaps the most active stellar nursery known.
You’ve probably seen images of the Orion Nebula, right? At 1500 light years away, it’s one of the brightest nebulae in the Milky Way, and is easily visible to the unaided eye. It’s about 30 light years across.
The Tarantula, however, is 160,000 light years away, and yet is still about as bright to the eye as the Orion Nebula. That’s because it’s frakking huge: it’s something like 1700 light years across, fifty times Orion’s size! If the Tarantula were placed at the distance of the Orion nebula, it would fill half the sky.
That’s big.
And so is this next image. The good folks at the European Southern Observatory stitched together several images of the Tarantula to make a mosaic of it that has 256 million pixels. Let’s see your store-bought camera do that!
This is a very, very compressed image of the big one. You could download an insanely monstrous 211 Mb 9000 x 8000 pixel image, but I recommend you go to their zoomable image of it instead, and tour around it. See if you can spot Supernova 1987A, a star which blew up and eventually led to me getting my PhD.
But try not to get lost. It’s a big place.
Number 7: The Face Defaced
Ah, the "Face" on Mars. Where would Richard Hoagland be without it? Shilling some other snake oil, I would guess.
But that’s a dream; people promoting antiscientific garbage always find some way to offload their claptrap. Still, it’s always nice to see them slapped in the face — or the Face — by reality.
This next dose of reality comes courtesy of the European Space Agency, whose Mars Express orbiter took some great high-resolution images of the Cydonia plain on Mars where the face is located. By taking images from different angles and with varying solar illumination, they were able to create a three-dimensional image of the "Face". Perhaps when this image was released Hoagland waited with bated breath to see his ravings confirmed, but that’ll be a long, long wait:
Wow, it’s uncanny, isn’t it? It looks just like a face… if that face was hit repeatedly with high speed projectiles and then covered with lumpy mashed potatoes.
That’s no face… it’s a butte! Yes, I know it’s actually a mesa and not a butte, but let a guy have a joke at someone else’s expense once in a while, OK?
Anyway, the ESA also put together a nifty 3D rotating animation of this, and there is another image taken from a different angle as well. That last one is marginally more face-like, but you have to kinda squint really hard to see it. There is also a cool suite of "Face" images online as well.
Number 6: Robots on Mars
Speaking of Mars, we humans have been sending our machines there for a long time. We still lose the odd one or two (getting to Mars is pretty hard in reality), but in general we’ve been getting better at it, and better at building them as well.
In 2006, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter switched on its HiRISE camera, a phenomenal device capable of taking images of the Red Planet’s surface with half a meter resolution. The pictures returned have been devastatingly amazing, with an incredible scientific return, but sometimes the best pictures have little scientific value, but are still, well, cool!
This is a very small piece of a HiRISE image of Victoria crater on Mars, showing just one part of the rim. And sitting right there on the edge of the crater is a little metal robot named Opportunity. Launched in July 2003, that rover was designed to work for only 90 days, yet it just celebrated its 1000th day on Mars! You might have a hard time seeing it in that image, so here’s a close-up:
There it is! You can see the shadow of the camera mast, and even the tracks of the rover.
Incredible.
Of course, I know in my brain that Opportunity is sitting on Mars, and I have seen all sorts of pictures it’s taken of itself. But somehow, seeing that image makes it really real.
We have robots on Mars! Humans are so smart.
Number 5: The Shuttle, the ISS, and the Sun
I still think it’s funny that most people are unaware that they can see man-made satellites easily with the naked eye. There are even websites that can tell you when a given satellite will pass near you!
The Shuttle, when it’s up, is a pretty bright object, as is the International Space Station. So if you do your homework and plan your observation extremely carefully, you just might make my Top Ten list.
Thierry Legault did just that. Not only did he get a picture of the Shuttle and the ISS, he nailed them while, from his viewing point, they were passing directly in front of the Sun.
This shot is simply stunning, and shows a tremendous effort in planning, timing, and execution. The picture was taken on September 17, 2006, less than an hour after Atlantis had undocked from the ISS. By capturing them in silhouette against the Sun, he could take such a short exposure that any atmospheric distortion was frozen out. This means he got incredible detail in his picture. Take a look at the zoomed image:
You can see different structures on the ISS, and even the vertical tail on the Shuttle! Given that the spacecraft were hundreds of kilometers away from Legault, this picture is truly an amazing feat.
Number 4: Direct Evidence of Dark Matter
This next picture takes a moment to set up, so please forgive me. Plus, I like to lecture sometimes.
As I was perusing images, I realized I didn’t have many that had strong scientific value, which was ironic. But that happens: most scientific images aren’t published because they’re pretty, and pretty pictures sometimes only get in the news because they’re pretty. But there was one image this year that has both beauty and a far deeper scientific significance.
It’s been known for decades that there is a lot of dark stuff out in space, between galaxies. We see its effects on the way galaxies rotate, and the way they behave when they live in clusters (like a city of galaxies). We know that this dark matter is ten times as common as regular matter (like the stuff we are made of: atoms of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and so forth), but it was undetectable, so it was somehow different than normal matter. But how, exactly? No one was sure.
One theory was that dark matter was made of weird particles that could interact with normal matter or other dark matter through gravity, but that was it. In other words, two colliding clouds of dark matter could pass right though each other like ghosts.
But how do you detect something like that? One way is through gravitational lensing. Matter has gravity, and gravity bends light. So if matter, even dark matter, gets between you and some distant object, it can act like a lens, distorting the light from the more distant object. By mapping out those distortions you can "see" dark matter.
So you know what those clever astronomers did? They looked at two colliding clusters of galaxies, which together are called the Bullet Cluster. Galaxy clusters have lots of gas pervading them, like fog in a city. When the clusters collided, the gas from each cluster smacked into the other head-on, grinding them to a halt. But if the dark matter is really this ethereal stuff it would keep on going, undeterred. If this were the case, you’d see the normal matter from the cluster closer to the center, with the dark matter on the outside.
And behind door number two…
Voila! The pinkish light is coming from the normal gas in the cluster. The dark matter reveals itself through its gravitational distortion of more distant objects, which is colored blue here. And look! The dark matter is on the outside, and the normal matter on the inside, just as predicted!
To an astronomer, this is completely convincing evidence that dark matter is real, and that the majority of the Universe is made up of stuff we simply don’t understand. What is it? Beats me, and it beats a lot of other scientists, too.
I love mysteries! That means there’s more to learn.
Number 3: Solar Shock Wave
The next image on my list makes me a little sore. When it was released I was busy and figured it wouldn’t be that interesting. I was completely wrong.
The Sun has a powerful magnetic field. The surface of the Sun is so hot that the atoms of gas have their electrons stripped off (the atoms are ionized), and this in turn makes them susceptible to those magnetic fields. In fact, the field is coupled with the matter: the gas follows the shape of the magnetic field lines, and as the gas moves the field lines also follows the gas. As the gas churns and boils on the surface, the field lines get all tangled up. A lot of energy gets squeezed in a tight space, and when that happens the magnetic field lines can suddenly and catastrophically reconnect, releasing vast amounts of energy in a solar flare.
On December 6, 2006, a big flare detonated on the Sun. The release of energy screamed outward over the surface, expanding in a circle. Astronomers at the National Solar Observatory caught this expanding shock wave in the act:
The fuzzy white ring is the expanding wave. The scale here is numbing: the Sun is 1.7 million kilometers across, so this ring was hundreds of thousands of kilometers in diameter. Heck, just the width of the ring is far larger than the Earth!
So why is this one of my top picks for 2006? After all, the still image doesn’t look like much! Ah, but the astronomers at NSO strung together a series of images into a dynamite animation. It’s totally cool. I couldn’t find the total energy released in this flare, but a typical big flare might blow off 1025 Joules… which is 10% of the total energy emitted by the Sun every second.
Still not sure how much that is? Think of it this way: a big hydrogen bomb might have a yield of about 1016 Joules, so this flare was the equivalent of one billion hydrogen bombs.
Yikes.
See why I picked this as number 3?
Number 2: Evidence of Water on Mars
Mars figured prominently in the headlines this year, and so it does here as well. This third image of the fourth rock from the Sun is my number two pick because it shows direct evidence for what might be the biggest discovery on Mars yet: the presence of recent water activity on the surface!
We know that there’s water on Mars, but it’s frozen. The polar caps have water ice, for example. And we see lots of evidence that water flowed billions of years ago on the surface too: there are gullies, river beds, and flow patterns of erosion. But if there’s any water near the surface, it must be frozen beneath it, like a permafrost.
But we’re humans, and we like our water to be liquid. Could there be any on the surface?
Recent pictures from the Mars Global Surveyor indicate that there is. It doesn’t last long, and there’s maybe not a huge amount of it, but it’s there.
The image on the laft was taken in August 1999, and the one on the right in September 2006. The difference is obvious: the later image shows a gully filled with a lighter-toned material that was not in the earlier one (in fact, it was later seen on images from Febraury 2004). Something seeped out from below the surface and deposited that material during the intervening time. The evidence that it was water is indirect, but very compelling. Dry dust flows are generally darker, and the flow shape indicates the medium was a liquid like water.
If it was water, then there was only enough in that flow to fill a few Olympic sized swimming pools. Not enough to keep a colony drinking, but then again I wouldn’t have wanted to be standing downstream when it erupted from the ground. It’s a fine start.
Again, while this isn’t rock-solid proof of recent water activity on the surface of Mars, it’s the simplest explanation, and that is extremely exciting.
And the Number One Astronomy Picture of 2006 is…
Saturn.
What else could it possibly have been?
This image has it all. It’s of a familiar object, seen in an unfamiliar way: back-lit by the Sun, a view impossible from Earth. It shows the whole planet, a rarity from space missions. The image shows very faint details and has very high resolution, a must.
But there is sheer artistry at work here. The colors, the lighting… I love the sun splash in the lower left limb of the planet, and the fans of ethereal mistiness shooting out from the rings. The shading on the planet itself is lovely, while the rings provide a geometric symmetry that is very appealing to the eye.
All this is necessary for the image to be the best, and together they may even be sufficient. But like all true winners, it has that extra addition, the over-the-top detail that pushes it into "all-time" status:
That dot in the center of the image is the Earth. It’s us. Cassini was nearly one billion miles from us when it took this image, orbiting a giant ball of gas as exotic and alien as any place we can imagine. From such a terribly removed location, the entire Earth is reduced to a single point of light, just one among an anonymous many as seen from our robotic proxy as our generation, for the first time in all of history, seeks out our neighborhood and takes a really good look.
That’s why this is the best astronomy image of 2006. And it’s one of the best of all time.
Still and all, a year is a long time. In 2007 we’ll see more astronomy missions launched into orbit, more telescopes built, more people than ever perusing the images from Mars, from Saturn, and from the depths of space. What portraits of the Universe will make the list next year?
[…] What a wonderful post, Bad Astronomy comes out with his Top Ten Astronomy images of 2006, complete with stories. I had completely missed the "Painting the Eclipse" photo, and am so glad Phil Plait has not. Wonderful. […]
Phil:
After the excitement and acrimony of the on-going debate between god and science (last post) I found this to be a real breath of fresh air! These really are wonderful images; thanks for sharing them.
Of course, NOW I have to clear away 211 mb of memory for a SERIOUS download…
Tom Epps
USNS Arctic
Persian Gulf
A delightful Top Ten of beautiful and powerful images. I know the new year’s resolutions may be even grander.
That last image, the little blue speck from the rings of Saturn - needs only one word. Awesome. My son might add the word, Dude, to the end.
Awesome, dude!
jbs
I can buy those as being a good top 10. I might have had a couple different ones but they match my personal 10 pretty close. (Actually I’m not sure some of my different ones came from 2006 and I just “discovered” them this year so they might be d/q’d)
The Saturn photo is very definitely my favourite astronomy photo and is in my list of my all time favourite photo irrespective of subject matter. It is simply stunningly, breathtakingly beautiful and just about any other adjective you care to throw at it and I never grow tired of looking at it.
JohnP
Pic 5 is awesome. But it’s always nice to check out our robots on Mars. I hope they like music.
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/mars_rocks_040226.html
The Saturn Photo strikes as the most impressive one because it shows incredible beauty that was, for eons, inaccessible for human eyes. What other hidden masterpieces will be revealed by space exploration?
Really nice set of photos. As a begining astro-photographer I enjoy the fact that you mixed some amature done shots into the mix.
Thanks!
I tried to get some from space, some from the ground, some pro, some not. My original list was about 40 images, and there are five more I dithered about. I’ll probably set up another blog entry about those.
Well, found myself my new PC wallpaper, I wish the Tarantula Nebula was as close as the Orion Nebula, would be a beautiful sight in the night time sky (don’t get to see much due to the city lights, but i bet they wouldn’t be able to blank that out)
There’s a surprising amount of touch-up work that you can do on that Saturn image, if you know what you’re about. It needs some brightness-contrast work, a bit of a color saturation hike, and to be made less grainy — but *then*, it truly looks perfect.
This is the stuff that sustains my love of astronomy. Wow! The actual visualization of the dark matter is my number one image.
You did a really nice job picking out these images. The far side of Saturn is one really great image. I can see why it would be number one to many people. All the Mars images are great, keep ‘em coming. Now we need to find extraterrestrial organisms somewhere.
But the one that I’m dwelling on is that visualization of matter we have suspected but can’t detect optically or with other electromagnetic detection instruments. And there it is: a false color gravity image. Well, I’m off to read more about the latest on this stuff.
This #1 Saturn photo is awesome, but I remember a post from this blog, where you posted a closeup photo of Saturn from a different angle - with clouds, and everything. That is awesome too!
There are so many to choose from.
I’ve decided that as a sky photographer I am not going to try to do the traditional DSO shots, hubble etc will always do that better than I. Instead I am trying to do more widefield shots of large parts of the sky. Right now I am working with a 1950’s model Medium format film camera (which is just a lot of fun to play with) and at some point I am going to go to 4×5 sheet film in a custom astrograph. I have it designed, now I need to find the time and money to build it. Not to mention find the right lens for it.
I touched up the Saturn image and resized it to 1280×1024 — less pixeliness, more vibrant colors. For anybody who wants it, just click my name and it’ll be downloadable.
I’m not about to argue with your choices or their order. I’m too busy trying not to drool! Good job BA!!!
[…] “The Top Ten Astronomy images of 2006“, no Bad Astronomy; […]
Perhaps you may address this in a future post: How do astronomers know that dark matter is different form other matter? Why are they so sure that dark matter is not, in fact, matter that is dark? For example, planets, asteroids, very diffuse but very large nebulae of hydrogen gas, and in general just objects that are not bright and large enough to be seen, but can have a large effect due to their number?
BA - “My original list was about 40 images, and there are five more I dithered about. I’ll probably set up another blog entry about those.”
Great!!! I’d love your top 25, soon, hopefully. But, I can wait till the end of the year (just not till Christmas). /wink\
Absolutely right about the #1 image, Phil. I adopted it as my background literally the moment it appeared on the web, and it’s been there ever since.
Now, when we get the first shot of an Earthlike exo-planet….
[…] En un sitio que acostumbramos leer llamado "Bad Astronomy" (en inglés), salen hoy las diez mejores fotografÃas astronómicas según el juicio del escritor de esta página el astrónomo Phil Plait. Pueden revisar las fotografÃas en su página. En orden las fotos son: […]
Maybe you should have written, “If that’s a face, it’s a butte!” (It IS pronounced like “beaut”, right?)
Lovely, although I guess I’d have liked to see an image FROM the rovers as well.
I do have a question/nitpick however. Why do you say “Yes, I know it’s actually a mesa and not a butte….”? To me, a mesa (which after all means “table” in Spanish) should have a flat top. The “face” does not. Of course where I grew up (Montana) we tended to call things with flat tops “buttes”. All very confusing!
Anyway, I really enjoyed the pics and will have to download some when I get back to work and have a “real” internet connection!
I’d forgotten about the image of Earth in the Saturn image, so I’ll agree with the assessment that that’s the best one! But I really feel a kinship with the Rover picture, too. Any image that “puts us in our place” is something that stretches my imagination to that place.
The image of Earth from Saturn reminds me of the Sagan quote at:
http://obs.nineplanets.org/psc/pbd.html
All the people we know about, all the history, all the wars — happened on that dot, which pales in significance when we begin to see the larger picture of where we are and how insignificant we are, physically, in the Universe at large.
And yet, our existence accounts for something because “we” took that picture. We surpassed our own imaginations, with programs like Starry Night, by seeing what the REAL image would be from that exact angle.
That’s why the Rover picture on Mars is significant to me. It shows that “we” are there — insignificant again on the scale of how large Mars is or even how large that crater is. But our little Rover is sitting there, attesting to the idea that the human spirit and human curiosity have transcended our physical world to work on another physical world.
Whatever happens to humanity, what with our propensity towards killing each other or changing our climate, those Rovers or humanity’s footprints on the Moon, or the Voyagers traveling to the stars fill me with great pride at our positive accomplishments so far. We’ve already made a positive difference to our Universe, because through our inquisitiveness and undaunting desire to know “the real story”, we’ve allowed the Universe to learn about itself, through our eyes.
valhar2000:How do astronomers know that dark matter is different form other matter?
20 years ago, there were two cometing theories about dark matter. MaCHOs and WIMPs: Massive Cosmic Halo Objects or Weakly Interacting Massive Particles. MaCHOs would be ordinary matter that just happens to be dark. But observations like the one pictured above tend to rule out the MaCHOs. The point of the observcation is that the dark matter has passed through and not been affected other than gravatationally. It hasn’t interacted with the normal matter passing by. The normal matter, OTOH, has clumped together more through interactions. It is observations like this that tend to support the “exotic matter” explanations and rule out ordinary but unobserved matter.
Speaking of the sun… I’ve always wondered about where the electrons which have been stripped from the plasma in the sun go. Are they part of the “soup” or are they ejected in the solar wind? If they remain behind, they must make some huge surrents in the massive magnetic field. Do they combine with protons making a neutron and a nutrino (which escapes) so that there are relatively more neutrons than protons than the relative amounts of hydrogen and helium would lead you to expect?
Very nice, Phil. That beautiful list made coming back to work today not so bad! I agree with the Saturn picture as being the best, and the rest of your ordering of the rest. Except if it was me, I would have made the dark matter picture the second best one. That having been said, they are all drool worthy and I tip my hat to you on your choices!
When did Cassini take the picture of the earth and moon in front of the sun?
Every one is overwhelmingly striking, Dr. BA. Wonderful choices.
Great post Phil, all 10 inspire awe. Thanks for sharing.
ruidh: If 0.084 C of electrical charge leaves the sun, then the electrostatic force on the outgoing electrons would already equal the massive gravitational force that the Sun exerts on them. (Google Calculator link above.) Wikipedia says that the latter is a surface acceleration of 28 g’s. I think it’s safe to say that the Sun keeps most of its electrons, and they just fly around the plasma most of the time.
[…] Bad Astronomy’s Top 10 Astronomy photos of 2006 via Shelly Powers author of the very nice Practical RDF “ […]
Y’all are focusing on that little blue dot in the left quadrant, but did you see the little black object (sorta domino-shaped, isn’t it) in the lower right?
OK, so I’m wishing a little bit that Clarke got it exactly right.
BA, if you keep throwing frakkings into your posts, we’re going to know exactly what you’ve been doing Friday nights. Do you mix some frellings in with the frakkings?
[…] Here is a list of top ten astronomy images of 2006 from Bad Astronomy Blog; link via Seed’s Daily Zeitgeist; my favourite is the Tarantula Nebula! […]
On a more humorous note, I’d like to name this for the worst Bad Astronomy photo of 2006:
http://www.newscientist.com/blog/space/2006/12/skull-on-mars-or-skullduggery.html
And, Bad Astronomer, please show the other 30 if you have the time.
Folks, if you liked this blog entry, please Digg it! I spent a lot of time on it, and I’d like to see it get as wide an audience as possible.
Digg is a social network of online articles, and it does have a lot of good links, so you should check it out anyway.
Oh– I also blogged about this on The Huffington Post, with a slightly different take.
Thanks! This made my end-of-the-year!!!
Excellent Images…
I think my favorite is definitely The Saturn one along with Sun, Shuttle & ISS and the Rover on Mars…
Top Ten Astronomical Images…
Over at Bad Astronomy, Phil Plait has his top ten astronomical images from 2006. The winner is above, but do drop over an checkout the rest…….
I am wowed by your number one choice. Thanks Phil Plait. It surely does put things into perspective.
I was looking at the picture of Saturn and your description while listening to “It’s Beginning to Get to Me” by Snow Patrol when I overheard a line talking about Saturn’s rings… creepy! Simply awesome lineup, and it is utterly mindblowing how amazing, wonderful and awesome the universe truly is! (faints in awe)
Ha! thanks, now I have a great reply for those stupid “Look at these” pictures some of my friends mail me. Going for the big DL and put it on the living room
HD.
Tanks Mon!
Astonishing!
Fair Dinkum!
Saturn has always been my favorite planet, #1 shows why.
Thanks Phil.
Jobst
[…] Bad Astronomy Blog » The Top Ten Astronomy Images of 2006 (tags: astronomy images) Posted by PapaScott Filed in delicious […]
How do we know it’s water and not some other fluid? Plus, I thought the Martian icecaps were made of CO2. Great post, otherwise.
[…] http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2006/12/27/the-top-ten-astronomy-images-of-2006/ […]
Dorothy, the link from that picture has more info on why they think it’s water and not some sort of liquid CO2. I talk about it a little in my original post about the picture, too (which is also linked from that part of this post).
Can’t wait to see the rest of the “runners up” that didn’t make the top 10! (Sorry if this is a double or triple post; my comments have not been showing up lately, to my knowledge.)
I remember the public excitement about the Apollo Program during the sixties. We would also would wait for what the Top 10 songs would be at the end of the year on the Billboard Music Charts.
Now-a-days I cannot even think of any songs that stick in my brain. Those Top 10 astronomical pictures for 2006 do haunt the brain (in a good way) for sure.
NASA just might be winning the public relations war with out even knowing it.
Hmmm……..Songs: Telstar, Apollo 100…….. Blinded by Science….
Any more Space Songs People?
Your blog entry makes it to the best link of 2006
The Top Ten Astronomy Images of 2006…
A collection of this years stunning Astronomy images, humbling to say the least….
Anyone know if there’s a company doing prints of any of these? I’d love a large framed image of the Saturn pic.
Always a pleasure to read your posts, Phil. I use APOD as a class period opener and your top 10 list will be a great way to start the new year! Have a great end of the current orbital period!
Jeff
Richard Hoagland is a non-committal kind of guy. No degree, no marriage, no children, changes topics (just like Ed Dames).
If he has the goods, he needs to expose them soon. He is not getting any younger…
Chris, there are companies online that will do that. Try Vistaprint.
[…] Bad Astronomy Blog » The Top Ten Astronomy Images of 2006 The Top Ten Astronomy Images of 2006 […]
Great list, the Saturn picture is awesome, am I also correct in noticing orion in the upper left hand corner between the reddish orange plumes? if so that just adds another reason to love this shot.
[…] http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2006/12/27/the-top-ten-astronomy-images-of-2006/ […]
I love the images you’ve picked but news-wise you really ought to have included something about Pluto. To the general public that was *the* news this year. Plus New Horizons launched to Pluto this year.
To Chris Drost: very nice job on the Saturn image. Can you make an unshrunk version available? I have a larger screen. (2560 x 1600 — yes, I know the original is only about 1300 high, but with a little interpolation I can fill it out.) Thanks!
[…] Continuando con esto de los TOP 10 (los ecuentro en todos los blog :O ), en el sitio Bad Astronomy publican su uno sobre imágenes de astronomÃa del 2006. En particular me gustó mucho la imágen número 9 que titularon “Pintando el Eclipse”. […]
Pintando el Eclipse…
Se trata de un Top 10 de fotos de astronomÃa, pero resalta la número 9 en donde el fotógrafo Laurent Laveder, logra un trabajo muy original y creativo…
[…] http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2006/12/27/the-top-ten-astronomy-images-of-2006/ […]
[…] Si, lo sé, es casi un tópico eso de que al llegar el final del año se haga un repaso a lo mejor (y lo peor) de estos 12 meses. Pero en este caso creo que merece la pena invertir unos minutos en contemplar las 10 mejores imágenes astronómicas del 2006, algunas son realmente espectaculares. […]
Wow. That’s an amazing collection of images. Thanks so much for putting them together!
Astounding collection. Thank you for this. I completely missed the Tarantula one, and now i know where my free time today will be spent!
This stuff is wonderful to see. I’m on the road to becoming a professional astronomer, and it is keeping in touch with the sheer awe and beauty that the universe has to offer that makes it so worthwhile. Many thanks for the collection and keep up the good work!
[…] En Bad Astronomy han preparado una lista con las 10 mejores astronómicas del año, la mayorÃa han copado las portadas de todas las páginas dedicadas a la astronomÃa, pero esta otra, relativa a un eclipse de luna sucedido en septiembre, me ha parecido la más poética. […]
My Very large Image Viewer for Windows (http://vlivviewer.free.fr/vliv.htm) will open the 211 Mb image instantly on limited memory/CPU machines.
Panning is immediate, Zooming would require converting the format to a specific
TIF one. Please ask for this converted image.
[…] This time is about Astronomy Images. […]
Simply Awesome ..
Excellent choices Phil! I particularly loved the Saturn shot as #1, and hadn’t seen it from that perspective before. AMAZING!
One small note: In your number 2 choice, you mention in the text that the second image on Mars was taken in September 2006, but the image’s actual date shows September 2005…
Love the site, and send Apollo skeptics who I met during my nightly star tours, here all the time. Fabulous resource for information!
Excellent site… Thanks for the collections.
[…] Sur le "Bad Astronomy blog" j'ai trouvé quelques chouettes photos : […]
[…] xmen legends 2 homing beacons xbox A collection of this years stunning Astronomy images, humbling to say the least. xmen legends 2 rise of apocolypse cheatsread more | digg story […]
Top 10 Astronomy Pictures of 2006…
Zu finden beim Bad Astronomy Blog.
Besonders faszinierend: ISS und Shuttle vor der Sonne.
……
I can never get over the apparent beauty of the universe.
[…] Na to zgodbo me je spomnila letoÅ¡nja zmagovalka med astronomskimi slikami po izboru strani badastronomy. Na sliki je Saturn v vsej svoji mogoÄnosti. Slikala ga je sonda Cassini v prviÄ videni perspektivi. […]
Good work here - nice roundup - well done
Great work!
The comments are hilarious. apparent beauty?
These images are “heavenly”.
[…] Bad Astronomy Blog » The Top Ten Astronomy Images of 2006 […]
WoW! TY!
[…] oooh, pretty December 29th, 2006 Bad Astronomy Blog » The Top Ten Astronomy Images of 2006 […]
Dude, I came here from the /. link, great round up. Some of these pictures really brought a lump to my throat.
[…] Today, he posted his top ten astronomy images of 2006. Awesome read/pics. If I had the money, I’ll print them up and post em over in our school, not that I’m not going to do it anyway. […]
Am happily sending to all on my list. Been using computers since 1950 at White Sands Proving Ground N.M. Your computer based pioneer work here greatly amplifies human intelligence/understanding on a global scale!
great work.. thanks for expanding my universe
Great choice, Phil. Thanks for collecting them in one post, great for showing to people who are less interested in astronomy.. There are guaranteed a couple of pics in there to wow anyone.
Your Hoagland comments are unjustified, moron.
Considering that moving water was on Mars as little as a few years ago.
The pics, kind of boring.
This is great!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Nice site!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
[…] Top Ten Astronomy Images of 2006 […]
[…] Enjoy there here. December 29th 2006 Posted to Astronomy […]
[…] Top 10 Astronomy Images […]
Per the BA…”Folks, if you liked this blog entry, please Digg it! I spent a lot of time on it, and I’d like to see it get as wide an audience as possible.”
Dang proud to do the dig, too.
For those who are interested this is the original image, I think it has a certain elegance lacking in the touched up image.
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/image-details.cfm?imageID=2314
Something no-one seemed to mention about the Saturn image (Not that I read all the posts) is the lighting of the planets surface. Since the sun is behind the image, the lighting of the surface is actually comming from refraction of light through the rings! That is why the lighting is brighter on the sides and almost non-existent on the top and bottom. Pretty Cool!
“Wow, it’s uncanny, isn’t it? It looks just like a face… if that face was hit repeatedly with high speed projectiles and then covered with lumpy mashed potatoes.”
Or subjected to several million years of wind and water and hit every now and then by meteorites.
The Sphinx doesn’t have much of a face either…
These are simply amazing. Thanks for putting this together for all of us to enjoy!
[…] The Top Ten Astronomy Images of 2006 I have to say that I am a big space person..I love the images on this page. Bad Astronomy Blog » The Top Ten Astronomy Images of 2006 __________________ My Portfolio Site — http://www.JoseRalat.com My Lcars Site — http://www.Okudagrams.com […]
Looks like you’ve been posted up on Slashdot… Any problems with the server going down? (Doesn’t appear that way…)
[…] Bad Astronomy Blog » The Top Ten Astronomy Images of 2006 […]
Wow. What an amazing collection of pictures! I’ve never been to this site before but it’s bookmarked now!
[…] This picture was voted the best astronomy picture of 2006 here which also shows a closeup of the Earth through the rings of Saturn, just “in case” you couldn’t find it above. […]
The image of Saturn is absolutely gorgeous. Then the detail of Earth as a pinpoint of light shining faintly through the rings… and suddenly, I was in tears.
Astronomical catharsis, indeed!
Can’t thank you enough…
Direct Evidence of Dark Matter and the super-sized one are my favorite!
p.s.
Bad Astronomer dude, this is very good stuff you have here.
Thank you - another story on the site that led me here talks about how space exploration does not interest young people - how sad that is when there is such astonishing beauty and technical achievement represented in the images you have selected for us.
[…] Neat! Via Business 2.0, originally posted at Bad Astronomy: […]
[…] The Bad Astronomy Blog created a list of his top ten astronomy images of 2006. There are some amazing pictures in this list. The Saturn picture is absolutely beautiful. More stuff like this: Photo ContestHow to Kill A Bear That Isn’t Alive in the First PlaceWishBinChristmas Photography TipsHelp These Kids Out […]
[…] The Bad Astronomy Blog gives a top ten list of astronomy images for 2006. There are some really wonderful choices there, and Phil Plait gives a good deal of discussion of each one. The winner is this fantastic back-lit (by the sun, not some giant NASA flashgun) image of Saturn taken -of course- by the Cassini mission: […]
Awesome!
I kept waiting, as I looked at stunning image after stunning image, for the Saturn image. Surely, I thought, he can’t have missed it, and, suddenly, IT WAS THERE!! Great job.
I heard badastronomy.com mentioned in reference to the dark matter image on NPR’s Talk of the Nation Science Friday this afternoon. Sure, it was by one of the callers, but, hey, still pretty good.
Absolutely stunning… I am still in awe at some of these. I keep coming back over and over and over to view them again!
Beautiful!
Thank you for the informative tour of the universe as well!!
simply breathtaking!! the dark matter and the saturn would be my runner-up and winner!!
Wow. Just… wow. It’s humbling to see just how small a part of the universe we are, both as a people and as a planet, and how much spectacle and glory there is outside of our “mostly harmless” blue-green sphere of influence.
This is why I’m a firm believer in the power of science–it has given us so much information on our stellar neighbours, interstellar regions, a view to the past (both recent and far-flung), and a glimpse into how it may all have started.
Simply awesome.
You’ve just expanded my universe! Saturn was the best! Thank you!
This is a great collection of 2006 photos, but I would have put the Mars picture at #1 or #2 for the same reason Louis Friedman said in an email I got today from The Planetary Society. Here was a picture of something we put on Mars that’s also taking pictures of Mars at ground level - it’s like, “Yes! We have a presence on another planet!” That is just such a cool concept. I’m so proud of those rovers.
But I have a softspot for the sublime Cassini images, so I can’t argue with that choice of #1. There really are not any disappointing Cassini images (at least that we see).
For me, a favorite photo of 2006 was Hubble’s close-up of the Pinwheel Galaxy. I also liked Hinode’s Mercury transit photo, and then Greg Piepol put it in 3-D, which was on APOD.
Wonderful to see such inspiring images but why aren’t they available to the public domain…We pay the taxes that make this all possible?
[…] story No Comments so far Leave a comment RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI Leave a comment Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTMLallowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong> […]
I’m wondering what you mean: Except for those photos taken by individuals, not agencies, they are all accessible to the public domain - you can download them to your heart’s content. Now, if you want prints, say from Hubble, you have to pay for those, naturally. I’ve seen all of these photos online, and so can you.
proof of eternity and how small humans are…
it is time to believe in God the Almighty.. isn’t HIM who created all this?
Imagine the beauty of Heaven..
Thoughtful and certainly thought-provoking stuff. The pictures are gorgeous, and as for them being your rather arbitrary choices, so what? As you say, it’s your site, and you know what you’re talking about, so that’s a given.
Thank you so much for posting the images, with accompanying text. Lecture away! You obviously know whereof you speak, and you do it in an engaging, personable manner. People who popularize science do us all a huge favour.
I’m curious… why did you go for such a self-deprecating handle for your site? There’s nothing the least bit bad about it! All the best, GJ
Bad Astronomy’s Top Ten…
Check out Bad Astronomy blogger Phil Plait’s picks for The Top Ten Astronomy Images of 2006…….
Great collection! The Atlantis/ISS transit, the MRO picture of Opportunity, and of course the nocturnal Saturn are my favorites!
Paint the Moonã€æœˆè•ã‚’å¡—ã‚‹ç”·ã®å†™çœŸ…
Paint the Moon ã¨å付ã‘られãŸå†™çœŸã‚’発見。 ç§ã¯ã€ã“ã†ã„ã†éŠã³å¿ƒã®ã‚る写真ãŒå¤§å¥½ãã 。 ……
congratulations Phil, these pictures are really fantastics, Number 3: Solar Shock Wave and Number 8: The Tarantula Writ Large are glorious and number Number 9: Painting the Eclipse is verry funny.
[…] This is a cool set of photos. Thierry Legault shot some awesome photos that have appeared on CNN, Bad Astronomy and The Next Net, to name three services. Take a look at the following image of the Sun. Do you see the dots against the backdrop of the Sun: […]
That picture of Saturn is truly awe-inspiring! As a graphic designer, if it didn’t know it was a photo, I’d have said it was rendered CGI… which leads me to my question: Looking at the rings where they pass between the planet and the camera, I noticed a few anomalies:
1) The dark band in the ring, if I remember my astronomy aright, is the Cassini Division, a region where there is less matter in the rings because it has been perturbed out of that orbit by the shepherd moons. Why then does the Cassini Division obscure the view of the planet considerably while the denser portions of the rings (which you would expect to obscure the planet more) do not?
2) Around the planet’s equator is a dark band and below that band the bottom (south?) hemisphere is noticeably brighter than the top one. The bright portion does not line up with the ring matter (as one would expect for the ring matter to be obscuring the front of the planet) so it seems that the brightness of the bottom hemisphere may be the effect of refraction or reflection off the rings? What actually causes this effect?
3) The lighter parts of the ring system appear to vanish completely when crossing the limb of the planet - as though the ring system were entirely on the far side of the planet (except for the Cassini Division, which makes the shot look rather Escheresque). Why is this?
4) Finally, I can see a “notch” in the outer edge of the wide, light part of the ring system, which I assume is caused by the planet’s shadow casting across the rings. Yet this shadow does not seem to affect the faint outermost ring. While I realise that the outer ring may be beyond the shadow, it appears that the “notch” is a widening shadow that one could expect to therefore encompass the outer ring as well. Why is this outer ring not thus obscured, or is there a reason why the shadow appears to be widening over the inner rings but not over the outer one?
All of this adds up to make the picture look “faked” (even though I’m sure it isn’t - don’t worry, I’m no HB! :), so it would be interesting to be enlightened about the strange conditions in outer space that defy common sense and make the Universe such a weird and wonderful place!
[…] Bad Astronomy has taken the trouble to list its Top 10 Astronomy Images for 2006, which also includes our own favorites like the face and water on Mars, and that Saturnian perspective of Earth. What you’re seeing here is not an egg yolk on a big black fat plate of nothing, but the Sun, and that dot near the equator is the International Space Station, while the even tinier dot beside it is the undocking space shuttle. The photo was taken on September 17, 2006, where the crew said “cheese,” but nobody cared. […]
[…] Fuente […]
[…] Dr. Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer has blogged his favorite astronomical photos for 2006. His top pick is this awesome photo of Saturn taken by the Cassini orbiter. […]
[…] Bad Astronomy presents a great collection of Best Astronomy photos of the year. It’s been a great year! […]
Number 5: The Shuttle, the ISS, and the Sun
Surely that is ET falling off of Henry’s bike!
[…] Very cool recap of the The Top Ten Astronomy Images of 2006 from the bad Astronomy blog. […]
Beautiful description, and wonderful material to work with. Giving credit to Dr. Plait is a pleasure, and being able to pass this view (easily) to all my friends is possible using this sharing site. Thank you, Dr. Plait, for all you do!
[…] Top10 Astronomy Images of 2006 … òàçè íà Ñàòóðí íàèñòèíà èçáèâà ðèáàòà. […]
[…] […]
[…] Bad Astronomy Blog: Top 10 de las mejores imagenes astronomicas del 2006 […]
This is great collection, mashalla. Thanks for sharing folks .. the good is always there.
[…] Bad Astronomy « Too Slow for Demolition […]
[…] For more amazing shots go and see badastonomy. These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. […]
[…] 10 Astronomy Pictures of 2006 December 31, 2006 Posted by gordonwatts in science. trackback Bad Astronomy has them up. The picture of Saturn, taken from the Cassini space craft is amazing(apparently it is 165 images stitched together). My favorite, however, is the ISS and the space shuttle passing in front of the sun. Exposure length: 1/8000th of a second. […]
fantastic images
Cool, you got a link from Edward Tufte too (one of my idols!):
Ask E. T.: Top 10 Astronomical Images
Ever since I first saw the picture of Saturn I have wanted to hang it on my wall. Unfortunately I have not been able to find it. Is there anyone here who could point me in the right direction?
[…] Bad Astronomy has their picks for the top ten astronomy images of 2006. I personally enjoy numbers 8 and 5. […]
That’s an amazing collection of images. I like the Saturn pic it’s awesome.
Thanks for sharing it.
[…] Check out the entire list: Link | Also, visit Laurent’s website for more cool images […]
[…] Check out the entire list: Link | Also, visit Laurent’s website for more cool images […]
Worth the effort. Loved Saturn & the Solar eclipse. Dark matter… oh hum, but the rest, i liked. Hadn’t heard of the Tarantula thingy, as i’m not big on Astronomy. It’s one topiv that won’t stop growing. The more we learn, the more we realize what we don’t know.
[…] Pretty neat Bad Astronomy Blog » The Top Ten Astronomy Images of 2006 __________________ Stacy A word to the wise ain’t necessary, it’s the stupid ones who need the advice. […]
[…] This photo made it to the The Top Ten Astronomy Images of 2006 on BadAstronomy. com. It was also Photo of the week in the Photo Gallery of SkyTonight.com. […]
It is gorgeous,amazing. I want to be an astronot
[…] Bad Astronomy Blog » The Top Ten Astronomy Images of 2006 #1 is amazing. another example (tags: astronomy 2006 images) […]
Amazing. Thank you for putting these together. Now off to choose a wallpaper!
The best pic of the year……..Now I’m by no means an astronomer, but I have a question I’m sure is easy to the astronomer enthusiast, but myself being a passive observer of astronomy…….
If that picture of jupiter is lit from behind by the sun (a view not possible on earth)….where is the light coming from on earth then? Because spatially looking at the picture, How could the earth be a concentric circle of light (presumably lit from the front then) and have Jupiter lit from behind. To me this could only happen if the sun were between the two bodies, thus not allowing to see one of them from any given angle. Thanks.
brad.litjay@gmail.com
I’m an infrequent visitor. Came to this article after Bill (http://dubiousquality.blogspot.com/) posted a link to it from one of his readers. I snagged a few images and posted some of the text on my site, along with a link (prior to any snagged content) to this article. Didn’t want to steal your bandwidth to show the images, and felt I needed to provide enough context to give my readers (only a few dozen a day, unfortunately) enough reason to come read the full thing. Hope I didn’t take to much - let me know if I should pare it down.
Awesome list and images, BTW.
RagManX
Brad, two points:
1) It’s not Jupiter, it’s Saturn. Didn’t you read the text?
2) The Sun is not big enough to block the view of the Earth, even if we’re seeing the sunny side of Earth. If it was, we wouldn’t be seeing Earth as a bright dot, but rather as a black dot crossing the Sun’s surface (like the Mercur and Venus passages). Also, by your logic, we shouldn’t be seeing Venus or Mercur at all.
An excellent selection. Many thanks.
It was probably deliberate on your part, but I note you refer to “normal” and “regular” matter when referring to our matter. Surely it’s the dark matter that should be so described, as it is far more common.
No way anyone should be able to argue about your pick (tho all were good)for the number #1 pic. I found myself out in space, looking back at my home planet. I felt an internal shiver…
[…] The little white dot is the Earth as seen from Saturn nearly a billion miles away. The photo was