What is the picture at the top of the blog?

I’ve just added an image to the blog header. I thought you might be intrigued by what it is and why i put it there. 

The why first:

When I was a young boy at school, (If I remember correctly) I won a prize: The Larouse Encycolpedia of Astoronomy. The book is amazingly out of date now! It did then serve to kindle my interest in astronomy.

Apart from being quite a massive book, there were some splendid mind stirring pictures. Not nearly as many or as fantastical and profound as those pictures now available now at Hubble

Today we understand the universe is a far bigger and more complex place than we could even think existed in the 1960’s. Moons in the solar system were thought of as lumps of barren rock just like smaller versions of our moon. Today we know quite different. In the 60’s it was thought black holes were forbidden by some quirk of universal laws: theoretical object only. Today we understand that there are billions of them lurking in every part of the universe.

The how:

With telescopes peering ever farther into the universe and not yet at the (apparent) point where the first galaxies condensed, an immense or even almost overwhelming number of images of objects including a multitude of colliding galaxies have been gathered. A few years ago these were published on the internet. This was done with a view to getting amateur astronomers to help classify them.

This project is  known as the galaxy zoo.

This very simple use of the internet was surprisingly successful. Whenever advances in technology have enabled us to look finer, further or at different wavelengths we have always discovered unexpected and revealing aspects of our universe. Entrancing views, demanded new and challenging explanations.  With such a plethora of new images from Hubble, the suggestion of simply asking everyone who was interested to look at the images was a low cost, low risk attractive option.   As it turned out, since the amateurs has a less grounded understanding of what they were looking at they were more inclined to the unbiased determination needed by science. Indeed one of these amateurs made the headlines by discovering a class object not previously encountered or observed.

The what:

The relatively unfettered discussion forum for the zoo also lead to these images being sorted in a serendipitous fashion.

This was possibly prompted by an earlier astronomical alphabet  or maybe just that compulsion having thought one galaxy unusually looked like a letter in their name, the idea arose that it would be cool to sign ones name on an astronomical forum in galaxy images?  What's not to like?

Individuals started organising some of the pictures into facsimiles of the alphabet. The results are here

Topic: Galactic Alphabet Repository :: @ABCDEFGHIJKLMNO
Topic: Galactic Alphabet Repository :: PQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_
Topic: Galactic Alphabet Repository :: `abcdefghijklmno
Topic: Galactic Alphabet Repository :: pqrstuvwxyz{|}~

Actually the success of the galaxy zoo internet project has lead to further projects where everyone, no matter their qualifications, can be involved in genuine front line and ground breaking research.

Go for it!

We live in truely interesting times.