Astronomy is the study of the universe. 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 thousands of astronomical pictures to choose from, and plenty of interesting stars to keep people enthralled.

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

That footage 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 hits it. So you would need to wear sunglasses! This moon is so interesting that Cassini will continue to fly by for more pictures later in its mission.

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

The entry for the 8th of September, 1995 was an amazing photo of the internal section of the ‘Milky Way’ galaxy taken by NASA’s COBE satellite. This area is usually invisible because of the dust masking it. But COBE scans in infrared, so produced that fantastic photo of our very symmetrical galaxy.

The astronomy picture of the day was identical on January 1st, 2000 and January 1st, 2001, the reason being that both dates shared this image is that most people thought of the year 2000 as the first year of the third millennium.

However, the third millennium actually started on January 1st, 2001. NASA reasoned it was just better to just go with the flow and do it on both dates. apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap010101.html depicts mankind’s view of the universe as it grew from mere objects circling the Earth, all the way to the ‘Big Bang’ creating the universe as we see it today.

NASA has thousands 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 vast numbers of people. If you are interested in astronomy, visit our website at: http://astronomy.the-real-way.com