“Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another”

Plato

I had mentioned that this semester I took a course on observational astronomy. And man is it worth it. It leaves so much knowledge, and can be really inspiring and informative as to how all the optical observations (which is what we have been seeing until now) are made, and how those striking photographs of nebulas, galaxies, star clusters and every celestial object known to the astronomical catalogues are produced. And from just seeing the image, you’d never imagine it goes through so much processing, but I shall dedicate another later and detailed post to that (when I manage to organize my thoughts and notes )

It’s really interesting to see how information from images can be extracted.

But observational astronomy has come a long way. From old school methods of film and glass plates to CCD devices and satellite images with high resolutions. This Gallery from the Discover online magazine gives an interesting comparison between images taken 50 years ago with the technology available then and images taken in more recent years with our present technology. It’s amazing the long way astronomy observation methods have evolved. Though, this is only a small sampling of photographs from the Solar System, and most (if not all) of it done through satellite and probe imaging, it is still a good example.

This incredible close-up image of a sunspot is another example of how detailed our images have become (and how much information you can obtain from it).

And if you are interested, good source for lots of astronomical (both earth-based and satellite) images is APOD.

Well that’s all for now. Enjoy.

Cheers, NM