Top 10 Astronomy Images of 2006

The Bad Astronomer writes "Astronomical observatories on the ground and in space return many terabytes of data every year. But which bytes are the best? I combed through thousands of pictures to find the Top 10 astronomy images of the year."

Re:A few others

[nacturation]

The ones in the article are all released in 2006 whereas the Most Amazing Galactic Images include prior years -- though I'd have to agree that many of those are truly spectacular to look at. What I found interesting about the badastronomy.com picks is that they all provide some fairly cool scientific insight behind them as to why they are top 10 picks. The image of the two galaxies colliding isn't all that special looking, but the explanation of how this provided convincing proof of the existence of dark matter makes up for the lack of visual wow-factor.
 

Best = most aesthetically pleasing

[syousef]

I've studied Astronomy at Masters level. I'm glad an Astronomer put these together instead of just some random artist who would have just picked the most pretty ones. There's still some leaning towards the aesthetic mind you - and there's a lot of science that isn't spectacular but is revolutionary none the less. Number 9 and number 5 are the least scientifically interesting to me, though artistically/photographically and from the point of view of timing I can see why they were included.

I'm not surprised at quality here though. Bad Astronomy is an awesome web site.

Re:A couple of stunning ones

[iainl]

NASA actually remembers putting the landers there. It's pretty damn sure it did so. So spending millions of taxpayer dollars to put a camera in low orbit just to remind itself doesn't seem like a good idea.

The high-res pictures of Mars are giving us real scientifically interesting data, though. Getting pics of the rovers are just a nice bonus.