Explanation:
This vacation included a sight to remember.
Pictured above, a picturesque starscape capped a serene seascape as seen from Turkey this past August.
In the above digitally stitched panorama, the
Gelidonya Lighthouse shines in the
foreground
before a calm
Mediterranean Sea.
On the left,
Jupiter is the brightest point in the image and since on the
same side of the Sun as the Earth, was near its yearly brightest.
Glowing just shy of
magnitude -3,
Jupiter was brighter than any star in the sky,
and brighter even than
Mars was during its famously bright
opposition of
2003 August.
On the right, the band of the
Milky Way Galaxy
fades into distant atmospheric haze above the
Jupiter
is nearing the closest part of its
elliptical orbit to the Sun and so will appear even
brighter during its next opposition in 2010 September.
digg_url = 'http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap090907.html'; digg_skin = 'compact';
