When I was taking astronomy in college my textbook had nothing much to look at but some really bad photographs of stars and some cheesy drawings of phenomena yet to be imaged. That was a while ago. Things have changed dramatically since, to say the least. Space images today are magnificent works of art.

Wanna see some?

There has been a staggering improvement in the last couple decades in the ability to image space objects. Charge-coupled devices, aka CCDs, have taken the place of film in space photography. They allow us to capture digital images in a fraction of the time it took to expose photographic plates.

Adaptive optics (AO) are newfangled computerized devices placed on telescope imaging equipment to get rid of the distortion caused by our atmosphere. Of course, those telescopes out in space need no such equipment and have been taking crystal clear images since the 1990’s. But, boy, what a difference they are making down here.

And we are no longer limited to just the visible wavelengths of light. We can “see” in just about every part of the electromagnetic spectrum nowadays, from lethal gamma rays all the way over to the harmless radio wavelengths and everything in between.

But where can we see these resplendent images?

They are all over publications such as Astronomy Magazine and Sky & Telescope. But you can also find them online - all over the web.

Starting in the so-called visible wavelengths, those we can see, you might begin your journey at the Hubble Space Telescope sites - hubble.nasa.gov, hubblesite.org, and heritage.stsci.edu. After a disastrous debut in the early 90’s, the Mighty Hubble got fixed. Here are archives of some of the most spectacular sky shots ever made. Be prepared to be awed.

There is another site that can take you on a journey through all our solar system. It is the by-product of all the NASA/JPL spaceflights made over the decades. This reservoir is absolutely filled with images from all the planets, their seemingly countless moons, and a host of other solar system debris. It is called the Planetary Photojournal and can be found at photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov.

A similar site, not as extensive, but arguably more easily understood, is The Nine Planets Solar System Tour at www.nineplanets.org.

But why stop at visible wavelengths? There are whole new worlds up there, unseen with human eyes.

The universe in infrared can be seen at the Spitzer Telescope site - www.spitzer.caltech.edu. Here you can get a little lesson on what seeing in infrared is all about, and then take some looks at seemingly ordinary parts of the sky and see how they brilliantly light up when seen with IR eyes.

One the other side of the spectrum is the strange world of x-ray astronomy found at Chandra X-Ray Observatory - chandra.harvard.edu. No pictures of bones or teeth here. Just superdeadly supernovae and supermassive blackholes.

Want to see the sun without burning your eyes out of their sockets? Go to the spectacular site of SOHO, The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory - sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov. Find here images of coronal mass ejections and solar flares and sunspots – and star-crossed comets crashing to their deaths.

Super-detailed images of sunspots, so detailed and large you feel you could fall into one, are found at a Swedish site, The Institute for Solar Physics - www.solarphysics.kva.se. But bring a rope, you just might fall in after all.

And there are images of our own planet, of course. But I cannot describe how jaw-dropping these images are; to do so would require a language not known to man. They can be found at the NASA Earth Observatory - earthobservatory.nasa.gov. I’m a little embarrassed to say I have spent hours and hours there just staring at the images of our beautiful planet – volcanoes, coastlines, hurricanes, mountain ranges, cities… Sigh…

You can see images of great telescopes themselves, and how they work, along with galleries of their images at sites like those for the twin Gemini Telescopes - gemini.edu – and, of course, our very own Classic on the Hill, Palomar Observatory - www.astro.caltech.edu/palomar.

But perhaps the most profound collection of astro images can be seen at the web workhouse of all images celestial, Astronomy Picture of the Day. As implied in the name there is a different image everyday, covering the entire spectrum of astronomy, with small descriptions and links for each. And there is an archive for all past thousands of images and a search tool for finding your favorite object.

And then, after surveying these amazing images, you and your family can sit down and have a philosophical discussion on why it is that mere collections of gas and dust can be considered “beautiful things,” and why they move us so.

Need I say anything more? No, I think you’ve got the picture.