"Beyond the Rim" by Brad Goldpaint, goldpaintphotography.com

Just when I thought Crater Lake couldn’t get any more photogenic, Brad Goldpaint captures a Lyrid meteor over it.

Did you see it? One of the more common questions during a meteor shower occurs because the time it takes for a meteor to flash is typically less than the time it takes for a head to turn. Possibly, though, the glory of seeing bright meteors shoot across and knowing that they were once small pebbles on another world might make it all worthwhile, even if your observing partner(s) could not share in every particular experience. Peaking over the past few days, a dark moonless sky allowed the Lyrids meteor shower to exhibit as many as 30 visible meteors per hour from some locations. A bright Lyrid meteor streaks above picturesque Crater Lake in Oregon, USA, in the above composite of nine exposures taken last week. Snow covers the foreground, while the majestic central band of our home galaxy arches well behind the serene lake. Other meteor showers this year include the Perseids in mid-August and the Leonids in mid-November, both expected to also dodge the glare of a bright Moon in 2012.

Posting on a stormy Friday night? Why not? This is BEAUTIFUL. (I suppose technically it’s “Vidspam”, not Picspam.)

Image Credit & Copyright: Tunç Tezel and Stéphane Guisard (TWAN)

What are we looking at? A full panorama of the Milky Way, as seen from both Northern and Southern Hemispheres of the earth…

A quest to find planet Earth’s darkest night skies led to this intriguing panorama. In projection, the mosaic view sandwiches the horizons visible in all-sky images taken from the northern hemisphere’s Canary Island of La Palma (top) and the south’s high Atacama Desert between the two hemispheres of the Milky Way Galaxy. The photographers’ choice of locations offered locally dark skies enjoyed by La Palma’s Roque de los Muchachos Observatory and Paranal Observatory in Chile. But it also allowed the directions to the Milky Way’s north and south galactic poles to be placed near the local zenith. That constrained the faint, diffuse glow of the plane of the Milky Way to the mountainous horizons. As a result, an even fainter S-shaped band of light, sunlight scattered by dust along the solar system’s ecliptic plane, can be completely traced through both northern and southern hemisphere night skies.

I’m breaking my “no Monday posting” rule because I really want to share this beautiful photo with you. It looks like poetry to me; a poem yet to be written, perhaps. The color is enchanting; the depth of the sky, intoxicating. The whole thing is tremendously inspiring! I’ve seen Milky Way + road photos before — always a striking composition — but this one stands out from the rest in my mind. The colors, the dark silhouettes of the trees, the lighting of the road… it’s fabulous, plain and simple. I can’t throw enough adjectives at it!

Credit & Copyright: Rogelio Bernal Andreo, blog.deepskycolors.com

Both these images are part of a larger panorama; I present in in halves so you can see it embiggered. Because all pretty space pictures should be presented as large as possible!

A Dark River of dust seems to run from our Galactic Center, then pool into a starfield containing photogenic sky wonders. Scrolling right will reveal many of these objects including (can you find?) the bright orange star Antares, a blue(-eyed) horsehead nebula, the white globular star cluster M4, the bright blue star system Rho Ophiuchi, the dark brown Pipe nebula, the red Lagoon nebula, the red and blue Trifid nebula, the red Cat’s Paw Nebula, and the multicolored but still important center of our Galaxy. This wide view captures in exquisite detail about 50 degrees of the nighttime sky, 100 times the size of the full Moon, covering constellations from the Archer (Sagittarius) through the Snake Holder (Ophiuchus), to the Scorpion (Scorpius). The Dark River itself can be identified as the brown dust lane connected to Antares, and spans about 100 light years. Since the Dark River dust lane lies only about 500 light years away, it only appears as a bridge to the much more distant Galactic Center, that actually lies about 25,000 light years farther away.

Credit & Copyright: Rogelio Bernal Andreo, blog.deepskycolors.com

Credit: Heidi Schweiker, WIYN, NOAO, AURA, NSF

I started Tau Zero by Poul Anderson the other night, and was struck by his description of the size of the universe as a ship is about to launch out into it — so much so that I scribbled down one of the lines into a notebook, half-asleep. Here it is (emphasis mine), too good to keep to myself:

Staring away from sun and planet, you saw a crystal darkness huger than you dared comprehend. It did not appear totally black; there were light reflections within your eyeballs, if nowhere else; but it was the final night, that our kindly sky holds from us. The stars thronged it, unwinking, their brilliance winter-cold. Those sufficiently luminous to be seen from the ground showed their colors clear in space: steel-blue Vega, golden Capella, ember of Betelgeuse. And if you were not trained, the lesser members of the galaxy that had become visible were so many as to drown the familiar constellations. The night was wild with suns.

And the Milky Way belted heaven with ice and silver; and the Magellanic Clouds were not vague shimmers but roiling and glowing; and the Andromeda Galaxy gleamed sharp across more than a million light-years; and you felt your soul drowning in those depths and hastily pulled your vision back to the snug cabin that held you.

“I Only Surf on Comets” by Peter Kramar

Posting two cool tees I saw recently on Threadless (via @moonrangerlaura.)

“The Milky Way” by Budi Satria Kwan

Map created by Samuel Arbesman

I have to say, I am just in AWE of this terrific concept by Samuel Arbesman. Not only does it ingeniously illustrate the relative positions of things in our galaxy, it mimics possibly my favorite map in the process (does one have such a thing as a favorite map? I hadn’t considered it until now, but yes, my statement is accurate: the Tube map is definitely my favorite map.)

This map is an attempt to approach our galaxy with a bit more familiarity than usual and get people thinking about long-term possibilities in outer space. Hopefully it can provide as a useful shorthand for our place in the Milky Way, the ‘important’ sights, and make inconceivable distances a bit less daunting. And while convenient interstellar travel is nothing more than a murky dream, and might always be that way, there is power in creating tools for beginning to wrap our minds around the interconnections of our galactic neighborhood.

Read the whole thing, it’s worthwhile.

Sky photo credit & copyright: Tony Hallas, astrophoto.com

Tony Hallas doesn’t know how his photo above thrilled me to bits on Christmas Day — I never dreamed I’d see my home-mountain — is that a term? I live at the foot of it — on APOD! I live near Mount Shasta, California, which is on the right side of his photo; I’ve cropped it above to show just Mt. Shasta, because it’s clearly better than Mt. Lassen and YES I AM EXTREMELY BIASED, I DON’T CARE! (If you don’t believe me, see for yourself. And if you like those sites, click here, eheh. Thank you.)

Anyway, all mountain-bias aside, I’d like to wish all my visitors and regular readers a very happy 2010 — may yours be especially awesome! Thanks for your (site) patronage!!

Milky Way Waterfall © Masahiro Miyasaka, taken at Zengoroodaki Waterfall, Norikura, Nagano, Japan

This is the overall winner of the Galilean Nights Astrophotography competition (part of the International Year of Astronomy), taken at a beautiful waterfall in Nagano Prefecture, Japan. This photo won the Earth and Sky division, as well as the overall competition; oddly enough, second runner-up in Earth and Sky was also shot in Nagano Prefecture. Although I’m surprised to see that a third of the winning photos (2/6) come from Nagano, I really shouldn’t be — it is an exceedingly beautiful place.