December 24, 2015
The constellations may be old, but the person celebrating beneath them is gloriously new by cosmic standards.
Star Colors and Pinyon Pine
Birthday · December 24, 2015
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APOD published December 24, 2015. Credit: Stan Honda. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
Beautiful, luminous decorations on this pinyon pine tree are actually bright stars in the constellation Scorpius and the faint glow of the central Milky Way. Captured in June from the north rim of the Grand Canyon of planet Earth, the shallow, close focus image has rendered pine needles on the tree branch sharp, but blurred the distant stars, their light smeared into remarkably colorful disks. Of course, temperature determines the color of a star. Most of the out-of-focus bright stars of Scorpius show a predominately blue hue, their surface temperatures much hotter than the Sun's. Cooler and larger than the Sun, and noticably redder on the scene, is giant star Antares at the heart of the scorpion. In focused, telescopic views the whitish disk at the upper right would be immediately recognizable though, reflecting the Sun's light as ringed gas giant Saturn.
Image credit: Stan Honda