Starship Asterisk*

Eclipsed Moon in the Milky Way

Explanation: On June 15, the totally eclipsed Moon was very dark, with the Moon itself positioned on the sky toward the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. This simple panorama captures totality from northern Iran in 8 consecutive exposures each 40 seconds long. In the evocative scene, the dark of the eclipsed Moon competes with the Milky Way's faint glow. The tantalizing red lunar disk lies just above the bowl of the dark Pipe Nebula, to the right of the glowing Lagoon and Trifid nebulae and the central Milky Way dust clouds. At the far right, the wide field is anchored by yellow Antares and the colorful clouds of Rho Ophiuchi. To identify other sights of the central Milky Way just slide your cursor over the image. The total phase of this first lunar eclipse of 2011 lasted an impressive 100 minutes. Parts of the eclipse were visible from most of planet Earth, with notable exceptions of North and Central America.

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Wow, what an image!!! It's splendid! How great it is to see the apparent size of the Moon (and the apparent color of the eclipsed Moon) compared with the apparent size and RGB color of objects in the Milky Way!

Thanks, Babak!

Ann

You said it, Ann: splendid indeed! Absolutely an instant favorite.

Fantastic! It's photos like this that help hammer home the vastness of the universe. Normally, we see photos of one feature or the other that indicate how huge they each are. Then we have this photo that lets us know that these huge features are just a mere speck in the whole. What a way to wake up this morning ....

What a novel Idea; showing the moon against the Milky Way in the background! Very nicely done.

What an excellent image! I am speechless...
Babak, thanks for the view!

WOW very nice.

APOD Robot wrote: Eclipsed Moon in the Milky Way

The tantalizing red lunar disk lies just above the bowl of the dark Pipe Nebula,

More Sisyphus than Tantalus actually:

The sisyphying red lunar disk lies just above the bowl of the dark Pipe Nebula,

http://www.phrases.org.uk/bulletin_board/32/messages/560.html wrote:
PUT THAT IN YOUR PIPE AND SMOKE IT

• Make what you can of what I've just said!;
  Digest that, if you can!;
  Put up with (or tolerate) that -- if you can!

The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary for this pipe-smoking expression is from Americans Abroad (1824), a two-act comedy by R. B. Peake. The next cite, a dozen years later, is from The Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens’s first novel.

But how did pipe-smoking get into an expression about dealing with something whether you like it or not? The saying is apparently derived from a belief that pipe-smoking and meditation go together, according to Eric Partridge’s A Dictionary of Catch Phrases, edited by Paul Beale.

"Oh My God -- It's Full of Stars!"
-- David Bowman, Astronaut, _2001: A Space Odyssey_ , Arthur C. Clarke.

When the moon crosses the Galactic Equator, is that another indication of 2012 and Doomsday, huh, Sensei?

I am always amazed at the images anyone associated with TWAN puts out but this one just me be my all time favorite! Great shot Mr. Tafreshi and thanks for posting it APOD!

Boomer12k wrote:When the moon crosses the Galactic Equator, is that another indication of 2012 and Doomsday, huh, Sensei?

I think this http://tinyurl.com/3q43tk9 image sums it all up!

I agree with Joe, I think the Mayans ran out of room on the rocks they were writing on when they reached 2012. Plus it simply represents the end of an epic in their cultural beliefs. Maybe they weren’t around long enough to come up with the follow up epic. Now popular culture is reading doom into 2012. Personally, I’m waiting for NASA to run out of room on the APOD servers before claiming to know the end of the world!

BTW – It's a beautiful image today... It’s such a lovely moon pose! And that background is sooo deep!

Gorgeous image, and wow, it really puts things in perspective.

Well done!

-Noel