Starry starry night...

Paint your palet blue and grey
look out on a summer's day
with eyes that know the darkness in my soul

Shadows on the hills

Sketch the trees and the daffodiles
catch the breeze and the winter chills
in colours on the snowy linen land

Now I understand
what you tried to say to me
and how you suffered for your sanity
and how you tried to set them free
they would not listen they did not know how
perhaps they'll listen now

... Vincent ( van Gogh ) - Don Mclean ...

... Peace - Johannes ...

ASTRONOMY PICTURE OF THE MONTH - 34 ...: IS THERE LIFE ON MARS... ?! This SENSATIONAL portion of a recent high-resolution picture from the HiRISE camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows twisting dark trails criss-crossing light colored terrain on the martian surface. Newly formed trails like these had presented researchers with a tantalizing martian mystery but are now known to be the work of miniature wind vortices known to occur on the red planet - martian dust devils. Such spinning columns of rising air heated by the warm surface are also common in dry and desert areas on planet Earth. Typically lasting only a few minutes, dust devils become

ASTRONOMY PICTURE OF THE MONTH - 33 ...: OUR MAGNIFICENT MILKY WAY GALAXY sprawls across this ambitious all-sky panorama... In fact, at 800 million pixels the full resolution mosaic strives to show all the stars the eye can see in planet Earth's night sky. Part of ESO's Gigagalaxy Zoom Project, the mosaicked images were recorded over several months of 2008 and 2009 at exceptional astronomical sites; the Atacama Desert in the southern hemisphere and the Canary Islands in the northern hemisphere. The individual frames were stitched together and mapped into a single, flat, apparently seamless 360 by 180 degree view. The final result is oriented

ASTRONOMY PICTURE OF THE MONTH - 32 ...: SUNSET ON MARS ( CLICK FOR FULL VIEW, YOU'RE ON MARS NOW ! )This serene sunset view, part of their extensive legacy of images from the martian surface, was recorded by the Mars Exploration Spirit Rover on May 19, 2005. Colors in the image have been slightly exaggerated but would likely be apparent to a human explorer's eye. Of course, fine martian dust particles suspended in the thin atmosphere lend the sky a reddish color, but the dust also scatters blue light in the forward direction, creating a bluish sky glow near the setting Sun. The Sun is setting behind the Gusev crater rim wall some 80 kilometers (50 miles) in

ASTRONOMY PICTURE OF THE MONTH - 31 ...: THIS MOON IS REALLY DOOMED ... Mars, the red planet named for the Roman god of war, has two tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos, whose names are derived from the Greek for Fear and Panic. These martian moons may well be captured asteroids originating in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter or perhaps from even more distant reaches of the Solar System. The larger moon, Phobos, is indeed seen to be a cratered, asteroid-like object in THIS STUNNING COLOR IMAGE from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, recorded at a resolution of about seven meters per pixel. But Phobos orbits so close to Mars - about 5,800 kilometers abo

ASTRONOMY PICTURE OF THE MONTH - 30 ...: WATCH THE UNIVERSE EVOLVE... What you see is a computer simulation depicting the evolution of our entire universe... At the top is a slice of the universe soon after the Big Bang - over 13 billion years ago. As time progresses towards below, the initially smooth universe can be seen becoming more and more clumpy ( stars, galaxies, clumps of galaxies, superclumps, megaclumps, and... sheer emptyness... ). The vertex near down below marks the 21st century AD.

This artificial universe, called a Hubble Volume, was designed to mimic what humanity might see were we to have powerful enough telescopes. Nevertheless, by comp...

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