Astronomy Images

[Haris]

Brilliant Venus and bright Jupiter still rise together before dawn. The
peaceful waters by a small lakeside house near Stuttgart, Germany reflect
their graceful arcing trails in this composited series of exposures, recorded
on the morning of July 26. A reflection of planet Earth's rotation on its axis,
the concentric trails of these celestial beacons along with trails of stars are
punctuated at their ends by a separate final frame in the morning skyview.
Easy to pick out, Venus is brightest and near the trees close to the
horizon. Jupiter arcs above it, toward the center of the image along with
the compact Pleiades star cluster and V-shaped Hyades anchored by bright
star Aldebaran. One trail looks wrong, though. Not concentric with the
others and so not a reflection of Earth's rotation, the International Space
Station streaks off the right side of this scene, glinting in sunlight as it
orbits planet Earth.


Amazing.

[Haris]

Northen Lights in Norway.

[Haris]

Partially eclipsed Sun setting in the Manila Bay in the Phillippines.

[faye]

^that is surreal. love it.

[pashtanajan]

Wow, the crescent moon in the last picture looks absolutely stunning. Why do I never get to see sights like that?

[Haris]

I genuinely used to think like that for a while. Got sad about how I would be missing all the cool stuff seeing mankind colonise space and develop while we're stuck here on Earth.


But then I realised that space travel & space exploration is really overrated (around the time I posted that poll about space exploration v development on Earth a year ago).

I recently watched an anime set in 2071 or something and one of the main themes was how the first world countries who had exploited and were still exploiting the 3rd world countries were the ones benefitting from space exploration. It was providing a bonus for the few while the many suffered of starvation & sanctions etc. It's a nice very realistic anime, called Planetes.


So if we colonise distant planets at the cost of our own people here on Earth, that's not something that I personally will be looking forward to.

[Haris]

Dark sand cascading down lighter pink sand near the north pole of Mars.

[Haris]

Herschel's Cygnus X

[Haris]

The Moon with Venus in Portugal.

[Haris]

Paris at night. All the light pollution makes it impossible to see any stars though the Moon, Jupiter & Venus are clearly visible.

[Haris]

The Heart & Soul nebulas.

The one on the right looks like a heart and I guess that's what a soul looks like on the left lol.

[Haris]

Sunrise over Argentina.
No-one is sure yet why it looks this way. It was not done with camera effects.

[Haris]

Lenticular clouds at sunset.

[Haris]

Night sky in the mountains of Croatia with illuminated clouds among the mountain peaks.
Millions of years ago the ocean of clouds would have been an ocean of water, part of the Pannonian sea which covered central Europe at that time.

[Haris]

Pleiades Deep Field