AWESOME PHOTOS

Explanation: Stars were not the only lights in Iowa skies. Spectacular northern lights also shone from the heavens, extending across the midwestern USA. The wide-ranging aurora was triggered as a large solar flare - an energetic cloud of particles blasted outward from the Sun a few days earlier - collided with planet Earth's magnetosphere.

Explanation: What is it? It was found at the bottom of the sea aboard an ancient Greek ship. Its seeming complexity has prompted decades of study, although many of its functions remained unknown. Recent X-rays of the device have now confirmed the nature of the Antikythera mechanism, and discovered several surprising functions. The mechanism has been discovered to be a mechanical computer of an accuracy thought impossible in 80 BC, when the ship that carried it sunk. Such sophisticated technology was not thought to be developed by humanity for another 1,000 years. Its wheels and gears create a portable orrery of the sky that predicted star and planet locations as well as lunar and solar eclipses. The mechanism, is 33 centimeters high and similar in size to a large book.

Explanation: Mars, the red planet, has two tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos, whose names are derived from the Greek for Fear and Panic. The larger moon, Phobos, is indeed seen to be a cratered, asteroid-like object in this image from the Mars Express spacecraft. Phobos orbits so close to Mars - about 5,800 kilometers above the surface compared to 400,000 kilometers for our moon - that gravitational tidal forces are dragging it down. In 100 million years or so it will likely crash into the surface or be shattered by stress caused by the relentless tidal forces, the debris forming a ring around Mars.

Explanation: Andromeda is the nearest major galaxy to our own Milky Way Galaxy. The several distinct stars that surround Andromeda's image are actually stars in our Galaxy that are well in front of the background object. Andromeda is so distant it takes about two million years for light to reach us from there.





Explanation: Three thousand light-years away, this image from the Hubble Space Telescope reveals the Cat's Eye Nebula to be one of the most complex planetary nebulae known. In fact, the features seen in the Cat's Eye are so complex that astronomers suspect the bright central object may actually be a binary star system.

Explanation: Follow the handle of the Big Dipper away from the dipper's bowl, until you get to the handle's last bright star. Then, just slide your telescope a little south and west and you might find this stunning pair of interacting galaxies, the 51st entry in Charles Messier's famous catalog.

Explanation: Astronomer Phil Jones recorded this detailed image of the Sun.The image was taken through a telescope equiped with an H-alpha filter that narrowly transmits only the red light from hydrogen atoms. Left of center, the tiny disk of the planet, Mercury seems to be imitating a small sunspot that looks a little too round.

Explanation: There's something behind these clouds. Those faint graceful arcs, upon inspection, are actually far, far in the distance. They are the Earth's Moon and the planet Venus. In the dramatic daytime image taken from Budapest, Hungary, the Moon and Venus shared a similar crescent phase a few minutes before the Moon eclipsed.

Explanation: The Crab Nebula is cataloged as M1, the first object on Charles Messier's famous list of things which are not comets. In fact, the Crab is now known to be a supernova remnant, expanding debris from the death explosion of a massive star. One of the most exotic objects known to modern astronomers, the Crab Pulsar, a neutron star spinning 30 times a second, is the bright spot near picture center. Spanning about 12 light-years, the Crab Nebula is 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Taurus.

Explanation: Two galaxies are squaring off . When two gallaxies collide, the stars that compose them usually do not. This is because galaxies are mostly empty space and, however bright, stars only take up only a small amount of that space. During the slow, hundred million year collision, however, one galaxy can rip the other apart gravitationally, and dust and gas common to both galaxies does collide.

Explanation: The large emission nebula dubbed IC 1805 looks, in whole, like a human heart. The nebula glows brightly in red light emitted by its most prominent element: hydrogen. The red glow and the larger shape are all created by a small group of stars near the nebula's center. The Heart Nebula is located about 7,500 light years away toward the constellation of Cassiopeia.

Explanation: This is what the Earth looks like at night. Human-made lights highlight particularly developed or populated areas of the Earth's surface, including the seaboards of Europe, the eastern United States, and Japan. The image is actually a composite of hundreds of pictures made by the orbiting DMSP satellites.

Explanation: The robotic rover, Opportunity, rolling across Mars stopped at Beagle Crater early last month and took a 360-degree panorama of the alien Martian landscape. Beagle crater appears in the center as a dip exposing relatively dark sand. Surrounding 35-meter Beagle Crater are many of the rocks ejected during its creation impact.

Explanation: Astronomer Josch Hambsch produced this stunning composite of star trails around the South Celestial Pole with an effective "all night" exposure time of almost 11 hours. To do it, he combined 128 consecutive five minute long digital exposures recorded in very dark night skies above Namibia.

Explanation: The cloud pictured below resulted from a series of flares released by an air force jet over the Atlantic Ocean in May. The jet that released the flares, a C17 Globemaster III, is seen on the right. The flares release smoke and the resulting pattern is sometimes known as a smoke angel. The circular eyes of the smoke angel are caused by air spiraling off the plane's wings and are known as wingtip vortices.

PRETTY COOL, HUH?