August 27, 2014
The story of your birthday began billions of years before calendars existed, in furnaces of light and clouds of dust.
Milky Way over Yellowstone
Birthday · August 27, 2014
A little universe, just for you
Your date.
Ready to give.
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APOD published August 27, 2014. Credit: Dave Lane. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
The Milky Way was not created by an evaporating lake. The colorful pool of water, about 10 meters across, is known as Silex Spring and is located in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, USA. Illuminated artificially, the colors are caused by layers of bacteria that grow in the hot spring. Steam rises off the spring, heated by a magma chamber deep underneath known as the Yellowstone hotspot. Unrelated and far in the distance, the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy arches high overhead, a band lit by billions of stars. The above picture is a 16-image panorama taken late last month. If the Yellowstone hotspot causes another supervolcanic eruption as it did 640,000 years ago, a large part of North America would be affected. Follow APOD on: Facebook, Google Plus, or Twitter
Image credit: Dave Lane