Recent Submissions: 2012 March 11-14

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Randy Shivak
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Re: Recent Submissions: 2012 March 11-14

Post by Randy Shivak » Thu Mar 15, 2012 7:58 pm

Solar Flare in Sunspot group 1429
Solar Flare in Sunspot group 1429

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Ann
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Re: Recent Submissions: 2012 March 11-14

Post by Ann » Fri Mar 16, 2012 7:17 pm

Belatedly, here are a few comments!

Mike Read and the UKIDSS consortium, United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT), that's a fascinating portrait of the central square degree of the Milky Way. There is an embarrassment of richness of stars there!

Juan Manuel Pérez Rayego, I love your elegantly spotted and delicately striped Sun. Of course the spots are intrinsic to the Sun, while the stripes belong to our Earthly atmosphere. Still... you almost make the Sun look like Jupiter, with a Great, if not necessarily Red (oh, but slightly orangish) Spot! Your second picture, the one with the tree, makes the Sun look even more like Jupiter.

Interestingly, Nuno Tavares achieves a slightly similar "spotted and striped" look for the Moon!

Stefano Campani and Davide Manca, that's a fine portrait of a fascinating galaxy, NGC 6946.

Wow, that's a colorful Moon, Carlos Di Nallo! I also like Pavlimir Ugrin's Moon, where the colors are very subtle but still noticeable.

Louie Atalasidis, that's a very fine processing of the Hubble data for the fascinating Tadpole galaxy!

Efrain Morales, what a lot of Mars portraits! And there is so much detail in them. I love the clouds.

Ignacio Diaz Bobillo, I like all three of your images, but my favorite is the Gabriela Mistral Nebula and the Gem Cluster. The details are very fine, the resolution very good, the composition very nice, and the colors are lovely.

And speaking of colors, that's an unexpectedly lovely composition of blue and various shades of apricot, Pablo Bueno.

César Blanco González, that's a fascinatingly detailed narrowband image of the Bubble Nebula and its surroundings.

Gilles Chapdelaine, that's a very nice processing of the Hubble data of the Cartwheel galaxy.

Michael Sidonio, that's a really very beautiful, very high-resolution, wide-angle and colorful portrait of the Eta Carina Nebula. Eta Carina itself looks like a bloated pink "queen bee", surrounded by a retinue of busy blue attendants!

matitoma, Matias, I really like your portrait of the Gabriela Mistral Nebula and the Gem Cluster. And I love your animation!

Salvatore Grasso, your processing of the Hubble data of M100 is fantastic. I completely love it. M100 is one of my absolutely favorite galaxies, and your image makes it look so marvellous.

And yet... possibly I have to award "my personal first prize" to Carlos Di Nallo. Your image portrays lower Scorpius with Lambda, Kappa and Theta Scorpii and clusters M6 and M7, among others. But the truly amazing thing about your picture is that the sky is "alive" in a way that almost makes me think of a van Gogh painting. The Milky Way glows golden near Baade's Window, the long thick central galactic dust lane is tumbling across the sky like an approaching storm of doom, and on the right the sky takes on a deep almost greenish color like the sea. Lambda Scorpii and a few more bright stars of Scorpius shine like blue lanterns or like eyes of gods. Below the sky the landscape is stark, yet alive, and the sky and the ground are equally resolved and detailed. The woman in white and black, and the girl in white and red, are totally at home in this timeless landscape of sky and ground which reminds me of a religious painting, or of a fantastic LP record cover from the 1960s.

I have neglected to mention many images here, but the quality was great as usual.Thanks to everyone who contributed images here.

Ann
Color Commentator

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