Fun in the Mango Grove

I have the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's Astronomy Picture of the Day set as my browser's home page. Every day they post a new image of something in the universe, as seen from Earth (or nearby). One day I'll be looking at the surface of Mars, through the lens of a camera orbiting the planet. The next day I'll see a cluster of stars right here in our own galaxy, followed a day later by an image only made possible by the Hubble Space Telescope: a cluster of galaxies!

Each time I view one of these images, I'm forced to pause a moment and consider the perspective. Here am I, one of billions of souls on this mote of dust whirling through space, amid countless other dust motes held together by a gravitational force we don't yet fully understand, in a universe impossibly huge, with distances so vast that when we look to the other side, we see the light that was emitted shortly after the formation of the universe itself.

These are some of my favorites.


V838 Mystery Star	Mir Space Station, with Moon	The Cone Nebula	Mars Rising Behind the Moon	NGC 3370



Proxima Centauri: Our closest neighbor	Earth at night	Lunation: A complete month	The Milky Way Galaxy, as seen from Earth	Abell 1589: Everything in this image is a galaxy



M74	Hawaii	Jupiter	Los Angeles at night	NGC5139



San Francisco	NGC3982	Pyramids at Cheops	Sombrero Galaxy	Popocatepetl eruption