[The pictures in this post need fixing!  And many others since my blog update!  Sorry!]

My brother brought these.. adjective-defying photographys of Saturn to my attention. They were taken last year by the Cassini space craft. This is from “the other side” of Saturn. The first on that page is the nearest approximation they can make to natural color; that’s how it might look to human eyes. Note, as mentioned on this page, that the Earth appears in the photograph! - as a small blue dot.

This photograph reminded me that since I was a child -

When on some gilded cloud or flowre
My gazing soul would dwell an hour..
-Henry Vaughn

(I highly recommend a text search on that page for those words and a read of that poem) - I’ve deeply loved space photographs. So I’ve now collected a lot of them, and here they are. I also found an Automatic Wallpaper Changer which I’ve started using to rotate these images on my desktop. Click any image for a larger (sometimes much larger - maybe larger than your browser) image. Or, to hoard them all ;) here are two huge pages spitting out the large images - the planetary photography collection and the celestial photography collection. Use the “Save” function from your browser’s file menu, saving it as a “complete web page” - which will grab all the images out. My further words about these images - after the images!

My comment on many of these is that they are breathtaking; especially some of the nebulae and planetary images, and the small slices of sky taken by the Hubble telescope looking as far as it can see, showing tens of thousands of galaxies! - each with their own million or trillion or ten trillion or more stars! Two of my very favorites I will directly link to the source of - this and this each photographically hugging moons of Saturn along it’s rings - real photographs!

(I just said “photographically hugging moons of Saturn”. I am a nerd.)

To the best of my knowledge these images are all in the Public Domain (as every page I have taken them from, if I rightly recall, says so), and created by NASA, except for the one of the Andromeda Galaxy (or M31), which was taken by John Lanoue. Thus you may collect these from this site and use or redistribute them at will for any purpose, so long as you credit their sources.

I’ve named the planetary images in number groups by order of the distance from the sun. (and they sort in that order on this page), and I name eleven large objects here, planets and dwarf planets, which include the small planet-sized body in a gap of the orbit of the asteroid belt, between Mars and Jupiter (Ceres)! For some time I have rejected the reclassification of Pluto as a “Dwarf Planet”, which the Interantional Astronomical Union did because an object slightly larger than Pluto was found orbiting far beyond it (Eris)! I accept the term under these considerations: 1. Sometimes “Less is More”. I would never have been led to learn of Ceres if it had not, as it just was, reclassified along with Pluto as a “Dwarf Planet”, which for Ceres was a promotion from “Asteroid”. I would still say it is an asteroid - the largest. 2. Redifining the term “Planet” is not unprecedented. Ceres was first considered a planet; then demoted to an asteroid. The Sun and the moon used to be called planets, being thought to orbit the Earth. However, someone brilliantly contends that the IAU’s new definition of “Dwarf Planet” includes, under their logical terms, Earth, Mars, and Jupiter. Under their reasoning, Earth is a “Dwarf Planet”, because its gravitational pull has not cleared the region of its orbit of asteroids or other objects which do not orbit it. I don’t think their definition was intended to have an asterisk saying “except for these three much larger, uh, planets”. I think the term as defined is unreliable, even absurd - except that we are calling celestial objects dwarves, which can’t be bad - but I think it needs refining or I wouldn’t be against considering more objects in our Solar System planets, after all 3. The term “Dwarf Planet” came about also because seven major and many other notable objects beyond Pluto very much like it have been discovered; it’s a whole different arena; the Solar System is very much different than what we had previously thought. Pluto and these objects are called “Trans-Neptunian Objects”.

Of these images I didn’t number Quoar; I don’t know its orbit - but I will learn it and the orbits of other Trans-Neptunian Objects.

Side note - did you know They have identified very many planets orbiting other stars? None of them are pictured here. They are called extrasolar planets or exoplanets. One of these orbits a triple star system, or 3 stars rotating around a common center of mass.

About this Automatic Wallpaper Changer - it works with any version of Windows. I’ll tell you what I love about it and how I’m using it. For various reasons I won’t use the available Windows XP “Power Toy” which does the same thing - only this privately programmed one is probably much better, and it is the first of very many of this type of program which I have surveyed that I like (and I have surveyed many). It does everything I want. It has four major plusses and three minor minuses. It’s plusses:

1. In this page of its options (program photos taken from author’s web page)-

- if you select the “No stretching” radio button and check the box to “Always shrink large pictures”, it will resize any picture larger than your desktop (such as many of these space photographs) down to fit, but maintain the aspect ratio of the image, so that, unlike many of this program’s competitors, the image won’t look weird, being stretched to wrong proportions (which I think this program amusingly refers to as “Worst fit” in its options) - it will look right.

2. It scans and auto-updates its list of images from one directory. You don’t have to manually fuss with a whole list of images - which you essentially already did just in collecting them and organizing them into one directory, which if you haven’t :) I’d recommend doing. Picasa might help that.

3. On this tab -

- the “Show filename” checkbox displays, in whatever size, font and color you choose, the name of the image in its upper right on the desktop, which for me with this collection helps to identify whether I am looking at a moon of Saturn or Jupiter and what the moon’s name is - downright educational, isn’t it?

4. As it applies a new image to the desktop it copies the image over one file of its own making which remains the desktop image, leaving the original unmodified and saving trouble because it’s a .bmp (I’ve seen system trouble with .jpg and other formats on the desktop and an “active” (web) “desktop”.).

Minor minuses:

1. There’s no option to auto-start it with Windows. If you want to do that, you’ll have to find the program icon, and right-click-and-drag it through your start menu to the “Startup” folder. I think doing that automatically at the user’s option would be better. 2. You can only get to the better options by going to the file menu->Preferences. I think to also access it from one simple and more intuitive menu button would help. I almost didn’t find the better options. 3. The X button on the application will end the program, not minimize, which is as it should be, but my force of habit works against that, while most system tray applications use the X only to minimize. I think it would be better if it minimized by default with an option to close on X, with or without a prompt.