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The images are in some ways the most beautiful pictures I have ever seen.
 technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

T e c h n o f i l e
Heavenly views of the night sky on your computer screen


Dec. 12, 2004


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2004, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2004, The Post-Standard

   December skies are clearer than the skies of warmer months, but the best way to see the heavens might be to stay indoors. You can gaze on any of the thousands of amazing space and astronomy photos at a site its fans call simply "APOD."
   The name stands for Astronomy Picture of the Day. The APOD Web site is run by a branch of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) with help from Michigan Technological University. The address is http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod.
   The APOD site has an amazing variety of space pictures, and you'll also find an occasional photo taken from Terra Firma, too -- shots of incredible displays of Northern Lights and photos of cloud formations that would make Michelangelo smile.
   You can use your Web browser's built-in picture-saving function to store copies of photos on the APOD site. Some browsers let you simply drag the photo off the page (click the mouse button on the picture, hold the button down and drag to the desktop, then let go). Others require a menu selection or a right-click function.
   But regardless of the technique you use to save any of the images, you'll find to your delight that all the pictures can be copied easily. APOD encourages you to save its pictures. There are no popup ads or other annoyances to get in the way.
   If you have a recent Apple Macintosh computer running the new Apple OS X operating system, you can automate your views of the pictures of the day with APOD Grabber, a free program from Maury McCown of Clute, Texas.
   APOD Grabber pops each photo up a lot faster than a Web browser could do it on its own, and it stores photos for quick recall later. It has a quick-save button, too, and the interface makes the SAVE button the active object; this means you need do nothing more than press Return once to select SAVE and once again to confirm the location of the saved file. (APOD Grabber always saves in the location you picked before, so saving additional images requires no actual choices.)
   You can get APOD Grabber from www.railheaddesign.com.
   For even more spectacular Northern Lights pictures, go to www.spacew.com/gallery, a site based in Stirling, in the Canadian province of Alberta. If you grew up, as I did, in the northeast, you might share my mistaken belief that you can see spectacular Northern Lights from places as far south of the North Pole as upstate New York.
   But those weren't the "real" Northern Lights I saw as a boy outside of Albany; they were Northern Night Lights or Northern Candles. What you'll see in these images of Northern Lights (many from Alaska) are the genuine articles, turning the deep black polar sky into lime- and orange-colored fantasies.
   The images on this site are in some ways the most beautiful pictures I have ever seen. You don't have to head off to the far north to enjoy the Aurora Borealis any more.