Space for Space
Astronomy Picture of the Day
I have laid down quite a bit of grey type in the last several posts, so I thought it was time to put a little more color back into this Blog, and give a plug to Astronomy Picture of the Day, a site that my four avid readers may already know can be accessed any time by clicking on the link to the right under the Blogroll label.
So, take a look at the Orion Nebula, in all its glory.
This is actually a bit of a phony photograph because it uses special "false color" processing to make visible the infrared images gathered from the Spitzer Space Telescope. If this was photojournalism, fingers would be wagging, because authenticity is paramount. Tinkering with images is tantamount to fraud. But in this picture from space, a little fraud helps us see what otherwise we would not. And since, if we looked up and tried to see this with the naked eye, we would not, we have to have a little inauthenticity to comprehend the almost incomprehensible. Too bad Spitzer is giving this a bit of a bad name. It is a pretty picture.
