It amazes me always how
little people know about the cosmic reality they live in. For
many it is undoubtedly enough to spend x hours a day turning
round bolts into round holes, take home the case of beer and
today's newspaper, then watch sport on TV, never considering that
they live in the biosphere of a rather ordinary planet, in the
ecosphere of a very typical type G dwarf star, one of a billion
in our local spiral galaxy, itself only one of billions, the
entire assembly moving at break-neck speed towards the
"Great Attractor" in the Virgo Cluster.
Here are a few photos to
stimulate your astronomical appetite (pun un-intentional) where
each thumbnail leads you to a dedicated page. More such
astounding images may be seen at the Astronomy sites I have
supplied in Favourite Links
How many others do you
know 
who live here?
Abell 39, a very distant
nebula,
in fact a phase of a Red Giant star caused when
the fusion reactions in a star can no longer continue stably
towards the end of the star's life. The star collapses in on
itself gravitationally and blows off its outer envelope leaving
the core remnant to illuminate the expanding envelope of ejected
gases. Such stars narrowly miss becoming supernovae.
One of the strangest
phenomena in the universe, 
a "Gravitational Lens"
Mankind, maturing in the
early childhood of its species on Earth, is reaching out of its
cradle to the stars 
were you there when this photo was taken from
Apollo 8?
Our nearest major
galactic neighbour
M31, the Andromeda Galaxy, which
looks much like our own seen from far outside its spiral arms.
This galaxy is regarded as the furthest astronomical object that
can be seen with the naked eye, at 2,2 million light-years
distance.
Are we really alone? 
Astrophysics and cosmogenetic
science is discovering that planet formation is far more common
than originally thought - it may well be more the rule than the
exception...
