Slate has a piece by Phil Plait showing the best astronomy images of 2012. The images are uniformly, unbelievably awe-inspiring and gorgeous. I want to become an astrophotographer when I grow up.
Here is a Hubble photo of a star-forming factory, about 170,000 light years away from us.
Here’s a photo from NASA/Goddard showing an eruption on the sun:
And here is a NASA photo of the transit of Venus back in June:
Please go take a look at all of them.
Following up on my resolution to add more pictures to this stupid blog, I’m going to steal a couple from the guy who sits next to me at work. (There are a lot of very annoyingly talented people where I work.) This photo is called Shadowscape:
And here’s one called Winter Water.
He also takes creepy photographs with weird filters and such, if you’re into that sort of thing. Check them out at the link! His site is in my blogroll, under “Images to Turn the Mind”, so it’s always available for your viewing pleasure.
Here’s the NASA caption for my new header:
This image shows one of the first views from NASA’s Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars the evening of Aug. 5 PDT (early morning hours Aug. 6 EDT). It was taken through a “fisheye” wide-angle lens on one of the rover’s Hazard-Avoidance cameras. These engineering cameras are located at the rover’s base. As planned, the early images are lower resolution. Larger color images are expected later in the week when the rover’s mast, carrying high-resolution cameras, is deployed. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
This is one spectacular achievement. We’ll go to color when Curiosity does.
Richard Bowker 