There are many nice images here!
There are two fascinating images of a large-looking orange Moon being "eaten" by something that is in front of it. Those are really striking images!
I like Robert Fields' images of the Heart and Soul nebulae, particularly the Soul Nebula. It looks like the Heart Nebula attached to its own semi-Siamese twin!
Nice closeup of the Heart Nebula, Wolfgang Promper!
The Crab Nebula looks interestingly different in Marco Angelini, Fabio Taliani and Francesco Antonucci's mapped color image. I assume that blue means OIII, green means Ha and red means SII, as usual.
That's a nice image of IC 4603: Reflection Nebula in Ophiuchius. I like the subtle interplay between brown and blue here, as the dust sometimes reflects the blue color of nearby stars, intensifying the color, and sometimes scatters it away, reddening the light. Tell me, Adriana Fernandez, are you a woman? If you are, I can't help saying that you are doubly welcome here, since there is a general shortage of women posting images here. (Of course, if you are man, you are most welcome here, too!)
Ah, Leonardo Orazi, I love your treatment of color! It's always a joy for me to see your astroimages. That's a deligthful protrait of the Double Cluster!
Mila Zinkova (are you a woman by any chance?), your Fata Morgana mirage is amazing!
And thanks, Jan Nickman (are you a woman?), for showing us where Orion spends his vacations. That looks like a moderately comfortable Rocky Mountain chair for the Hunter!
Kathryn Michener, you must definitely be a woman! I love your rings around the Moon. So delicate and perfect.
Hale Bopp is a golden oldie, but I really like the color contrast between orangish Andromeda and blue-white Hale Bopp (and Double Cluster!).
That's a very beautiful portrait of the Cocoon Nebula. The picture is very deep, and I love the contrast between the incredibly starry background and the partly-opaque nebula. I also love the incredibly subtle and beautiful colors, so that we can see the emission nebula change color from magenta at the center to a much purer red close to where the emission nebulosity ends. And just look at how the reflection nebula changes between subtle shades of grey, blue and green.
Peter Teuben, I love your home-made radio telescope. It looks delightfully quaint, and I meant that as a compliment. I love the way you play with light and shadows in your picture, too!
Gimmi Ratto, I completely love your image of Omicron Persei. This star is intrinsically very bright and blue, but when its light reaches us it has been reddened. In your wonderful closeup of Omicron Persei's "neighbourhood", we get to see the intricate dusty surroundings that reddens it. Great image!
Jesper Grønne, I'm always very glad to see you here. That's a splendid aurora, particularly the purple parts of it. Some parts of it look almost aqua-colored, too. Fantastic. I can't understand how you can see and photograph so many aurorae, because I live not all that far away from you, and I never see any aurorae! (But of course, I tend to go to bed early. Oh well.)
Manuel Jimenez, your image of SH2-170 almost looks like a giant volcano, seen from above. Great image!
Mario Weigand, I'm always happy to see beautiful color pictures of Jupiter. Yours are splendid, with the added bonus of Io, too, and we get to see three different "aspects of Jupiter's rotation cycle" as well as Io's orbit!
Some pictures here are amazing in their way they make a relatively normal scene here on the Earth look positively otherworldly. I love the way Aston Dodd has captured a man standing on a canoe and gliding through the moonbeam reflected on water.
That green aurora reflected in that perfectly still and clear lake makes the scenery appear almost enchanted. I love how the aurora itself is "still" and "softly glowing", adding to the serenity of the night.
My favorite, however, is Philippe Moussette's amazing double rainbow portrait and the fantastic and almost "impossible" play of light over this scene. It really looks as if the rainbow was a perfectly shaped flourescent glass bowl, locking the houses inside a world apart from our own.
Finally I have to thank Jean-Pierre Brahic and Jesús Carmona de Argila for their images of solar prominences.Thank you so much for comparing the size of these awesome prominences with the size of the Earth!
But Jean-Pierre, just because you called your image "Sun Proms", I can't resist giving you this link to another "Prom", a very English concert known as the Last Night of the Proms:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oONWgcvPutE
Thanks to everyone who posted images here!
Ann
P.S. César, that's a fantastic image of the "grainy" "surface" of the Sun (are those things called spicules?) with the masts superimposed on the face of the Sun!
