Astronomy is the study of the galaxies. Some astrologers practice it as a serious science while for others it is an educational pastime. For this reason, whenever an astronomy picture of the day is offered to the general public, people usually jump at the chance of looking at it. There are plenty of astronomical pictures to choose from, and plenty of interesting celestial objects to keep people interested.

Of course ,NASA is one of the primary sources for an astronomy picture of the day. This site, NASA.gov, shows a new picture each and every day. There is also a section that shows movies. These could be used to create your own image site. Saturn’s moon Enceladus was the ‘star’ feature on November 5, 2008.

That photo was taken by a passing rocket. It can reproduce details the size of a bus. The ice on this moon reflects as glare, nearly 100% of all the sun light that reaches it. So you would need to wear sunglasses! This moon is so fascinating that Cassini will continue to fly by for more images later in its mission.

NASA maintains an archive of all the astronomy photo of the day dating all the way back to June 16th, 1995. It was a ‘what if’ photo of the Earth posing as a neutron star. The picture is a computer generation. The most fascinating feature is that the constellation of Orion is visible twice. This is because even light from behind a neutron star is visible since the dense star bends the light around it. This causes some objects to be seen twice.

The entry for September 8th, 1995 was an amazing photo of the central part of the ‘Milky Way’ galaxy taken by NASA’s COBE satellite. This area is normally not visible because of the dust hiding it. But COBE scans in infrared, so produced that fantastic image of our very symmetrical galaxy.

The astronomy picture of the day was the same on January 1st, 2000 and January 1st, 2001. The explanation why both dates displayed this image is that most people considered the year 2000 as the first year of the third millennium.

However, the third millennium actually began on January 1st, 2001. NASA figured it was just better to just do it on both dates. apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap010101.html shows man’s view of the universe as it progressed from mere objects orbiting the Earth, all the way to the ‘Big Bang’ creating the universe as we know it today.

NASA has many more days with their own astronomy picture of the day. Visit the web site, NASA.gov to see them.

Astronomy: pictures of the day are fascinating to huge numbers of people. If you are fascinated by astronomy, go along to our website at: http://astronomy.the-real-way.com Get a totally unique version of this article from our article submission service