Oooo, shiny!

I like changing the background picture on my computer desktop every month or two. I inevitably choose an astronomy photo, and the most convenient source of beautiful and interesting astronomy pictures is the wonderful Astronomy Picture of the Day from NASA. Hey, we're already paying for them, so might as well use them. I have it in my daily RSS feed. When I bother to read the detailed explanation that accompanies the photos, I almost always learn something about astronomy that I didn't know before.

The one above is now my new desktop picture. See it in its glorious maximum resolution here, and see the explanation of it here.

I only started using it with a heavy heart, because it meant giving up the one I had been using, which is this astonishing image:




Click to see it at full size. See the explanation of it here.