This image shows the moon during a lunar eclipse, viewable by most people on Earth. The picture is actually a composite of two exposures, the longer one used to capture the stars in the constellation Leo. Most of the background stars are too faint to be visible to the naked eye and are only visible due to the second long-exposure photograph.

Observatorium III: Observatorium Hard With a Vengeance

Every time I've looked at the sky I've failed to see Venus. It's like a ridiculous curse; I can see all sorts of Canis and Orion and a whole handful of zodiacal numbers, but when I'm like "Mr. P. said there was some Venus up in here, where the Venus at?" it's nowhere to be found. I actually could be seeing it just as a bright star and ignoring it for all I know, but every time you tell us specifically where to look and I do I can't see it or that part of the sky is cloudy. What a huge load.

Observatorium II: This Time It's Personal

On my way to the store for ice cream last week I looked up at the night sky and noticed an absolutely amazing halo of light outlining several clouds with moonlight. I managed to snap a picture before the moon moved out from behind the clouds; it was awesome. You had to have been there I guess.

Observatorium

This is a short anecdote that serves to illustrate how much of an Astronomy student I am.
I was headbanging at a metal concert in Ft. Lauderdale recently when I looked up during a brief lull in the music. Despite the ridiculously bright lights and the obvious distractions present I was able to discern all 7 of Orion's brighter stars. They were also the only stars I was able to see in the sky. I'm cool.

William Lassell discovered Neptune's moon Triton in 1846 when investigating what he believed to be a ring of the blue planet. This photograph was taken in 1989 by Voyager 2, which is presently the only satellite to have passed close enough to Triton to make decent observations. Ironically, Voyager 2 also discovered that Neptune had several small icy rings that would have been impossible for Lassell to have observed.

The Rosette Nebula is pictured here. At the center of these dust clouds in an emission nebula full of hot, new stars. The nebula actually glows with ultraviolet light emitted from the center of the cluster. The entire thing is about 100 light-years across and is some 5000 light-years away in the otherwise-bland constellation Monoceros.

Certain areas of saturn's moon Titan reflect very little radar. A major hypothesis as to the cause of this phenomenon is lakes of liquid methane dotting the moon's surface. Titan's strange chemical atmosphere is thought to resemble that of the Earth in its early stages prior to the evolution of life; though the temperature is extremely cold there are thought to be crystal boulders of water strewn about the moon's surface, which has the consistency of wet clay.

Gamma Cygni is a bright supergiant star at the center of Cygnus' Northern Cross asterism. It is known as Sadr and lies at the center of this six-degree sky-scape including three nebulae and millions of other stars. Sadr is estimated to be about 750 light-years distant, while the nebulae range from 2,000 to almost 5,000 light-years.

this group of galaxies is almost 450 million light-years away from earth- galaxy cluster Abell S0740. the view is dominated by the large elliptical galaxy at the center of the cluster; it is 100,000 light-years across, comparable in size to our own Milky Way, and contains more than 100 billion stars.

This alternate view of the lunar eclipse on the 3rd more closely resembles a solar eclipse, as the disc of the earth obscures the sun's light from the moon. in this photo, the sun can be seen poking out from the upper left of the earth. The moon will rise already in its eclipsed state in North America.