From APOD:
Staring across interstellar space, the alluring Cat's Eye Nebula lies three thousand light-years from Earth.
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Here, Hubble Space Telescope archival image data has been reprocessed to create another look the cosmic cat's eye. Compared to well-known Hubble pictures, the alternative processing strives to sharpen and improve the visiblility of details in light and dark areas of the nebula and also applies a more complex color palette.
Images like this are proof that we need to spend more on space exploration. If we let the Hubble die and fail to send another telescope up there, we're really slipping.
1 comment:
Let's point people here: http://apod.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ to the astronomy picture of the day. What I love about so many of these deep space photos is the background (not so much in this particular picture). At my converted evangelical uncle's funeral recently the little nazi preacher said something about atheists looking at the night sky and seeing "thousands" of stars. At the time I thought to myself how small this moron's world is.
Take a look at this picture from APOD: http://apod.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0803/M104b_peris2048.jpg
Everything in the picture that's not a bright little point (and many that are) is a galaxy. Each galaxy has billions of stars in it. This photo spans an area very similar to the head of a pin held at arm's length against the night sky. Try to extrapolate that many galaxies to the entire sky. "Thousands" of stars my ass. It takes the most simple of simpletons to believe the universe is so small or that we are so great.
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