Fascinatingly kids, dinosaurs, optical illusions & HD wallpaper

Here are some of my favorite images from Nasa. They are of the Galexy, Sun, Moon, planets and the solar system. Also, there are some great colorful pictures of fascinating things like black holes and stellar nebula.

To download the wallpaper image of the nebula, click on the picture thumbnail to go to the large hi resolution photo, then you can set that image as your desktop wallpaper by right clicking and choosing set as wallpaper from the menu.

Snowflakes in the Universal Sky

Like cascading snowflakes un the instellar night, the strange shapes an and textures of the stars in the Snowflake Cluster abound in the Cone Nebula. These patterns result from the tumultuous unrest that accompanies the formation of the open cluster of stars known as NGC 2264. Bright stars from the cluster dot the field and they soon heat up and destroy the gas and dust mountains in which they formed. One such dust mountain is the famous Cone Nebula, visible in the above image on the left, pointing toward a bright star near the center of the field.

The Spiral Galexy

M51, whose name comes from being the 51st entry in Charles Messier’s catalog, is considered to be a classic example of a spiral galaxy. At a distance of about 30 million light years from Earth, it is also one of the brightest spirals in the night sky. A composite image of M51, also known as the Whirlpool Galaxy, shows the majesty of its structure in a dramatic new way through several of NASA’s orbiting observatories. X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory reveals point-like sources (purple) that are black holes and neutron stars in binary star systems. Chandra also detects a diffuse glow of hot gas that permeates the space between the stars. Optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope (green) and infrared emission from the Spitzer Space Telescope (red) both highlight long lanes in the spiral arms that consist of stars and gas laced with dust. A view of M51 with the GALEX telescope shows hot, young stars that produce lots of ultraviolet energy (blue).

The textbook spiral structure is thought be the result of an interaction M51 is experiencing with its close galactic neighbor, NGC 5195

Ghost Head Nebula

The Ghost Head Nebula, or NGC 2080, is a star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our own Milky Way Galaxy. The nebula spans about 50 light-years and this image, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, is shown in representative colors.

Evaporating Planet

Planet HD 209458b is evaporating. It is so close to its parent star that its heated atmosphere is simply expanding away into space. Some astronomers studying this distant planetary system now believe they have detected water vapor among the gases being liberated.

Quasars - Bursting With Stars and Black Holes

A growing black hole, called a quasar, can be seen at the center of a faraway galaxy in this artist’s concept. Using NASA’s Spitzer and Chandra Space Telescopes, astronomers discovered swarms of similar quasars hiding in dusty galaxies in the distant universe.

The new-found quasars belong to a long-lost population that had been theorized to be buried inside dusty, distant galaxies, but were never actually seen. While some quasars are easy to detect because they are oriented in such a way that their X-rays point toward Earth, others are oriented with their surrounding doughnut-clouds blocking the X-rays from our point of view. In addition, dust and gas in the galaxy itself can block the X-rays.

Astronomers had observed the most energetic of this dusty, or obscured, bunch before, but the “masses,” or more typical members of the population, remained missing. Using data from Spitzer and Chandra, scientists uncovered many of these lost quasars in the bellies of massive galaxies between 9 and 11 billion light-years away. Because the galaxies were also busy making stars, the scientists now believe most massive galaxies spent their adolescence building stars and black holes simultaneously

The Fairy of Eagle Nebula

The dust sculptures of the Eagle Nebula are evaporating. As powerful starlight whittles away these cool cosmic mountains, the statuesque pillars that remain might be imagined as mythical beasts

Here are some more of the coolest wallpaper images of awsome space clouds, black holes and nebulas.

For more outer space, Earth view from space, solar system and space shuttle wallpaper check out the Outer Space Wallpaper Page… Fascinatingly.com

Where space exploration and our imagination took off!

July 1950 with the launch of a space rocket at Cape Canaveral by NASA. Almost 60 years later we have so much to show for that first big step… all the cool pictures for one.

Mars rovers, International space stations, Space shuttles… WOW, I can’t even imagine what 60 more years or so will bring. Well, yes I can.

First Launch

A new chapter in space flight began in July 1950 with the launch of the first rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla: the Bumper 2, an ambitious two-stage rocket program that topped a V-2 missile base with a Corporal rocket. The upper stage was able to reach then-record altitudes of almost 250 miles, higher than the International Space Station’s orbit.

Launched under the direction of the General Electric Company, Bumper 2 was used primarily for testing rocket systems and for research on the upper atmosphere. The rockets carried small payloads that allowed them to measure attributes including air temperature and cosmic ray impacts. Seven years later, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I and Sputnik II, the first satellites into Earth orbit.