I also very much like your portrait of the NGC 1333 starforming region. The contrast between the bright newborn young star, immersed in blue reflection nebulosity, the dark dust complex and the various dust-embedded orange-colored stellar embryos and the bright red clumps - small Ha jets from boisterous stellar babies? - is fantastic. The image is very deep and detailed, too. I had to check out the blue star. It appears to be TYC 2342 624, whose visual magnitude is 10.6 and its color index is 0.48, typical of a F-type star. But because the star is clearly so reddened, it may be a late B-type star instead.
Speaking about face-on spiral galaxies, one such galaxy which has had "her" beauty marred by the Milky Way itself is IC 342! Yes, because our galaxy has scattered dust in "her" face! Or rather, we Earthlings see IC 342 through a very thick curtain of dust in our own galaxy. Robert Pölzl, you certainly manage to make this galaxy look pretty anyway!
Another very interesting image is Fabian Neyer's portrait of the Double Cluster in Perseus. What makes the picture so interesting is that it shows large tendrils of faint Ha emission over much of the image. I checked out your homepage and found that you had had to work hard to bring out this Ha emission, so we can be sure that it is faint. Nevertheless, it is very interesting to see it.
Other favorites of mine here is Dieter Willasch's beautiful star forming region in Corona Australis and Dmitry Makolkin's impressively natural-color image of the Moon. At least I think it looks very natural-color!
I also like Miguel Claro's iimage of the Sun and clouds. The Sun has been reddened here, so that it looks intensely yellow. But wait, isn't the Sun yellow for real? Isn't this the true color of the Sun? No, it isn't, because when the Sun is unreddened it is white. But sometimes reddening will really give the Sun this amazing dandelion color.
I alos like Göran Strand's image of sunspots. What I like best about the image is the dull beige color of the sky and the blue halo around the Sun. I couldn't find any information about the image, but it first appeared to me that the picture may have been taken through the kind of thin, even cloud cover that lets the Sun shine through. On second thought, I realized that it is probably just such a short exposure that everything but the Sun and the most brilliantly illuminated sky next to it are looking dark. But the image reminds me, ever so slightly, of the "blue sunset" on Mars.
There are very many other nice images here. I'm impressed, for example, by Pavel Pech's portrait of dark nebulae in Camelopardalis. I'm touched by Tom Heisey's Abandoned Train Station and Cabooses image, where the relics of technology past are seen against an intensely blue, probably moonlit night sky. And there are very fine portraits of galaxies, the Sun, various nebulae and so on.
Thanks to everybody who contributed images here!
Ann
