Top Ten Astronomy Pictures of 2008

I like "The Mote In Sauron's Eye"...clever. Interesting pick for number 1.

Phil's passion, breadth of knowledge and humanity will make him an Internet icon for as long as he cares to blog.

My big problem with most astronomy pictures is that they are essentially fakes. NASA (and astronomers in general for that matter) were masters of photoshopping before there was even a Photoshop. While the basics of an image may be factual, the stuff the space and astronomy industry (and it is an industry) puts out for public consumption is VERY HIGHLY enhanced/sharpened/colorized/etc. to make it much more exciting to the public, i.e. both taxpayers and politicians controlling the purse strings.

So, unfortunately, you can't really have much faith in any of the publicly released images. No doubt that good research is being done, but everything is so tinkered with by graphic artists it's not really science anymore. The real (more raw) scientifically valid images (and they exist) don't frequently see the light of day because they have a lot less WOW factor for people weaned on Star Wars, Star Trek, and the like.

This is the work of the Shatan! Allah be praised to destroy the kaffir telescope!

I love this pic. It makes you realize how big the univers is.

NGC 7331 backwards is 1337 CGN... now we're talking :D

Shopped!

I disagree with alot of them though.