Astronomy Picture of the Day - 2018 April 12
Hello Friends
I will share each day a different image or photograph taken by NASA of our fascinating universe!
M22 and the Wanderers
Wandering through the constellation Sagittarius, bright planets Mars and Saturn appeared together in early morning skies over the last weeks. They are captured in this 3 degree wide field-of-view from March 31 in a close celestial triangle with large globular star cluster Messier 22. Of course M22 (bottom left) is about 10,000 light-years distant, a massive ball of over 100,000 stars much older than our Sun. Pale yellow and shining by reflected sunlight, Saturn (on top) is about 82 light-minutes away. Look carefully and you can spot large moon Titan as a pinpoint of light at about the 5 o'clock position in the glare of Saturn's overexposed disk. Slightly brighter and redder Mars is 9 light-minutes distant. While both planets are moving on toward upcoming oppositions, by July Mars will become much brighter still, with good telescopic views near its 2018 opposition a mere 3.2 light-minutes from planet Earth.
amazing
wow, this is beautiful , thanks for sharing...
Another cracking photograph. I find it hard to contemplate lightspeed, to us the concept of it seems an unattainable speed.
However when one looks at the universe I also have trouble wrapping my head around the fact that it is pretty slow, in that nothing is faster? I mean slow in the sense that it would take billions of years to get from one side to the other, how can this be the fastest thing known to science?
Anyway I'm waffling....nice pic.