I like the bacteriophage one. I've not seen a picture of one of those at that high a magnification before. I read a paper, not all that long ago, on the structure of the hypodermic syringe style apparatus they use to inject their RNA through the cell wall. Very cool. I'm intrigued by the idea that when things are operating at that small a scale a lot of their structures turn out to be analogous to mechanical devices (Just built out of atoms instead of cogs, gears and wheels etc.)
I'm more of an astronomical photo person myself, the scale of the things being imaged just blows my mind. So I'm not sure I agree with you over the whole false colouration issue in Hubble images, the colours tell us something. I mean, the universe is a fairly dull place if you're only limited to the spectrum of visible light. The really cool and interesting stuff is happening at other wavelengths. And also electron micrographs show things that it's impossible to image using visible light, as the photons are too "big"; so for all intents and purposes they're really false colour images too, only in black and white. But that's just me being pedantic...
So from one extreme to the other. I just love this picture:
It's a supernova remnant (Tycho's Star to be precise, which went up in the 1500s) and is taken in X-rays: the higher the colour in the spectrum the hotter (more energetic) the gas is - and given this is an X-ray image, the gas is
really hot, the blue shockwave is at 20 million Kelvin. And it's much bigger than the solar system.
And this picture will forever fill me with joy...
The small thing is Io, it's 3600 km across and is orbiting Jupiter at about 421,000 km... And human beings sent something way out there to take that picture. How cool is that?
This post has been edited by stone monkey: 20 March 2009 - 05:31 PM
If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you are subconsciously aware of having no good reason for thinking as you do. If some one maintains that two and two are five, or that Iceland is on the equator, you feel pity rather than anger, unless you know so little of arithmetic or geography that his opinion shakes your own contrary conviction. … So whenever you find yourself getting angry about a difference of opinion, be on your guard; you will probably find, on examination, that your belief is going beyond what the evidence warrants. Bertrand Russell