Dr. Phil Plait selects his favorite space pictures every year, but this year he had a lot to sift through. The top 16 pictures taken from the viewpoint of space include volcanoes, hurricanes, earth formations, the moon, eclipses, and spacecraft, including the final space shuttle missions. Astronaut Ron Garan took this photograph of the moon from the International Space Station. See the rest at Bad Astronomy Blog. Link
Dr. Phil Plait selects his favorite space pictures every year, but this year he had a lot to sift through. The top 16 pictures taken from the viewpoint of space include volcanoes, hurricanes, earth formations, the moon, eclipses, and spacecraft, including the final space shuttle missions. Astronaut Ron Garan took this photograph of the moon from the International Space Station. See the rest at Bad Astronomy Blog. Link
Actually I suspect the list was compiled more than a week before it was published, for one simple reason. Rolf Olsen's staggering photograph of the circumstellar disc around Beta Pictoris was published on the 30th of November. And that is certainly among the best astrophotographs of 2011. I would add that it is possibly the cleverest especially given the equipment used to create it.
http://www.pbase.com/rolfolsen/beta_pictoris