Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Just a quickie post tonight (or this morning, whichever you prefer. Local time is 12:53 AM as I begin writing this). I have enjoyed the Astronomy Picture of the Day ( or APOD) website for years. Basically, a new photo related to astronomy in some fashion is displayed each day, along with commentary. But yesterday's and today's photos are pretty cool, even for APOD.




First, this APOD photo above (for Sep 19 2008) shows a star very similar to our Sun. But check out the small fuzzball above and to the left of the star, about 11 o'clock. That is no star. It is a huge gas giant planet (we have those here in our star system as well - Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune) massing about 8 times the mass of Jupiter. What you are looking at is an actual direct image of another planet. Now, astronomers have inferred the existence of so-called extrasolar planets time and time again, other planets orbiting other stars. But this is the first time we've ever gotten an visual image of another planet outside of our Solar system. I think that's something of a milestone.





Next up we have the APOD for Sep 20, 2008. It was taken during the Aug 1 total solar eclipse, and the photographer used 55 separate exposures, ranging from 1/125 to 8 seconds. Normally in a solar eclipse, you can't make out the details of the lunar service. But here you can. I just liked this photo for some reason.

There's actually alot more stuff I could blog right now, but it's getting late so I'll try and post something tomorrow.