Poll: Select the Astronomy Pic of the Week for May 23-29

[owlice]

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Please vote (once) for the best Astronomy PIcture of the Week (image and text) for May 23-29.
(Repeated APODs are not included in the poll.)

All images are clickable and link to the original APOD page.

Thank you!
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<- Previous week's poll


Station and Shuttle Transit the Sun, May 23



Rho Ophiuchi Wide Field, May 24



Looking Back Across Mars, May 25



Clouds and Stars over Cotopaxi Volcano in Ecuador, May 26

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap100526.html


M13: The Great Globular Cluster in Hercules, May 27



Atlantis over Rhodes, May 28



Black Holes in Merging Galaxies, May 29

[carolemary]

Saturn

[Ann]

I chose Rho Ophiuchi. Rogelio Bernal Andreo is a favorite of mine whose delightfully colorful crisp clear wide angle images have been made Astronomy Picture of the Day several times. Deservedly so, if you ask me.

The Mars image is interesting. The tracks of a man-made machine are imprinted on the stark Martian landscape. It's a world of magnificent desolation, as somebody put it. How lucky we are to be living on the Earth. But then again, if we had been Martians, we would either have been microbes or dead. Or both.

I like galaxy pictures, and I think it's interesting to be told new things about interacting galaxies. I thought the color balance of the galaxies was pretty good. But the galaxies looked blurry, and the pictures weren't good enough for me to vote for them. And while the news of their AGNs was interesting enough, it wasn't sufficiently sensational for me to vote for them for that reason.

Atlantis transiting the Sun was a good enough picture, but it isn't the kind of stuff that I will usually vote for. (And the Sun looks so yellow. I've just written about twenty posts or more about how I don't think that the Sun is yellow.)

Globular clusters also aren't my thing. The only globular I've ever looked at is M13 in Hercules. My eyes glazed over with boredom at the apparently uniform off-white, ever so slightly sickly greenish, color of the cluster.

I agree with the others who have voted that the Atlantis over Rhodes picture was the least interesting of them all.

I'm a tiny bit sorry that I didn't vote for the time lapse movie. It was nice, and I always get such a wonderful sense of vertigo when I watch movies that so obviusly changes the Earth from the stationary center of the universe into one small body in the universe which is just dancing and turning with the rest of them. But there were a few too many clouds in the movie.

Anyway, I really like these polls!

[rstevenson]

... Globular clusters also aren't my thing. The only globular I've ever looked at is M13 in Hercules. My eyes glazed over with boredom at the apparently uniform off-white, ever so slightly sickly greenish, color of the cluster. ...

There ya go with the colour thing again.

I like globular clusters because they're small enough to see the stars, or many of them anyway, and that helps give me a sense of their vastness and at the same time their compactness, their crowdedness, and yes, sometimes their colourfulness. I also love galaxies, but they're kind of blatant, too flagrantly enjoying themselves. Clusters are more sedate and not so immediately interesting, so they can draw you in for a closer look.

I happen to have M13 as my desktop image at the moment. But my favourite is Omega Centauri (NGC 5139) of which I have several images. In particular I like the closeup (a Hubble image from last summer) of the dense central region, speckled with red, orange, yellow and blue stars (you'd hate it.) If I remember the numbers correctly, a 20 ly sphere around Sol encompasses only a couple of dozen stars, but the same sphere in the middle of Omega Centauri would enclose something like 50,000 stars. That sort of thing just rings my chimes.

Oddly, I did not vote for M13 this time around, but only because Mars is my favourite planet in this neck of the woods, and I just love those spunky rovers.

Rob

PS
We need a heart icon in the smilies selection, so I can say "I [heart] Globular Clusters."

[Ann]

Hey, Rob, congrats on your globular cluster infatuation! We all need our space favorites. And even I realize that globular clusters are amazing things. I even realize that they contain colored stars. They are just not my thing, but they are your thing, and they are a lot of other people's thing, too!

And I agree with you that we need more smilies.

Ann

[Ann]

One more thing about the color of M13. I'm not asking anyone to share my sense of aesthetics, but do you realize that M13 has the same overall color as the Sun? Its integrated color index is 0.67, almost exactly the same as the Sun's. And if the Sun is white, as I insist it is, then it is no wonder that M13 look off-white to me!

And of course, if you take a look at the picture of M13 posted here, its overall color seems to be white, too. So yes, I'd say that it is a good picture!

Ann

[rstevenson]

I'm seeing a pale bronze intermixed with purple.

Rob

[owlice]

Topaz and sapphires for me!