The study of space objects such as planets, galaxies and stars is Astronomy. Some people do it for a living, others just to pass the time. Thus whenever an astronomy picture of the day is offered to people, they grab it. There are plenty of such pictures to choose from, and plenty of interesting objects out there to keep people looking.
NASA of course is a primary source for an astronomy picture of the day. This site NASA.gov shows a new image each and every day. There's also another section that shows videos and images. This could be an excellent source for images and videos for your own daily updated site. Saturn's moon Enceladus was featured on November 5, 2008. The space probe Cassini took this image. It gets down to details the size of the bus. One interesting feature of the ice on Enceladus is that it reflects 99% of the light that falls onto it. Wear sunglasses. Cassini is scheduled for more flybys during its mission.
NASA's images of the day go all the way back to June 16, 1995. It was a representation of the earth as if it were as dense as a neutron star. The image is a computer generation. It shows Orion visible twice. The reason is that a Neutron star is so dense that light, even from behind the star, is visible as it is pulled around by the intense gravity. This causes some double vision.
September 8, 1995 brought a very interesting image of the central part of our own Milky Way galaxy from the NASA COBE Satellite. Due to space dust this would normally not be visible to the naked eye or to a telescope. But COBE scans in infrared, so produced the amazing image of our very symmetrical galaxy.
The astronomy picture of the day was the same on January 1, 2000 and January 1, 2001. The reason both dates shared this image is that most people considered the year 2000 as the first year of the third millennium. However the third millennium actually began on January 1, 2001.
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Article Added on Monday, July 13, 2009
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