Waterway To Orbit

The 32nd shuttle mission to the International Space Station, STS-130, left planet Earth on February 8. Its early morning launch to orbit from Kennedy Space Center's pad 39A followed the long, graceful, eastward arc seen in this 2 minute time exposure. Well composed, the dramatic picture also shows the arc's watery reflection from the Intracoastal Waterway Bridge, in Ponte Vedra, Florida, about 115 miles north of the launch site. In the celestial background a waning crescent Moon and stars left their own short trails against the still dark sky. The brightest star trail near the moon was made by red supergiant Antares, alpha star of the constellation Scorpius.

Amazing Toilet Signs From All Over the World-Part1 (IMAGES)

Hubble Telescope's Top Ten Greatest Space Photographs

The Sombrero Galaxy - 28 million light years from Earth - was voted best picture taken by the Hubble telescope. The dimensions of the galaxy, officially called M104, are as spectacular as its appearance. It has 800 billion suns and is 50,000 light years across.

he Ant Nebula, a cloud of dust and gas whose technical name is Mz3, resembles an ant when observed using ground-based telescopes.. . The nebula lies within our galaxy between 3,000 and 6,000 light years from Earth.

In third place is Nebula NGC 2392, called 'Eskimo' because it looks like a face surrounded by a furry hood. The hood is, in fact, a ring of comet-shaped objects flying away from a dying star. Eskimo is 5,000 light years from Earth.

At four is the Cat's Eye Nebula.

The Hourglass Nebula, 8,000 light years away, has a 'pinched-in- the-middle' look because the winds that shape it are weaker at the centre.

In sixth place is the Cone Nebula. The part pictured here is 2.5 light years in length (the equivalent of 23 million return trips to the Moon).

The Perfect Storm, a small region in the Swan Nebula, 5,500 light years away, described as 'a bubbly ocean of hydrogen and small amounts of oxygen, sulphur and other elements'.


Starry Night, so named because it reminded astronomers of the Van Gogh painting. It is a halo of light around a star in the Milky Way.
The glowering eyes from 114 million light years away are the swirling cores of two merging galaxies called NGC 2207 and IC 2163 in the distant Canis Major constellation.
The Trifid Nebula. A 'stellar nursery', 9,000 light years from here, it is where new stars are being born.

The world’s greatest apple artworks(IMAGES)

Helge Lundstrom is said to be the best apple artist in the world…I wonder if he’s the only one too? This man makes a different apple mosaic every year for the Apple Market Festival in Kivik, Sweden and each one is more beautiful than the other. Only problem I have is about all those wasted apples, just like the Orange Festival of Ivrea where tons of oranges go to waste, when they can all be donated to some poor country where people are dying of hunger. But, other than that, Helge Lundstrom’s apple art looks simply amazing.He uses more than 75,000 apples for each of his apple mosaics

The Giant Flower Carpet of Brussels (IMAGES)

Once every two years, the Grand Place, a central market in Brussles, Belgium becomes one of the largest flower gardens in the world. This year people could admire a beautiful flower carpet
between the 14th and 17th of August, for those of you that missed it, there’s always two years from now.
The flower carpet of Grand Place has a different model every time and it’s made out of roughly 700,000 begonias. This is definitely one of the must see- attractions of Brussels.

China’s fast-food menu for the 2008 Olympics (IMAGES)