Apropos of nothing, I figured I would post 10 astronomical images that actually made me yell out loud “Oh my god!” when I first saw them. (This is not an exhaustive list. Feel free to post some of your own as well, I love beautiful astronomy images....)

1973: Saturn through my first telescope. OK, this image is a cheat, my 8-yr-old self didn’t take this picture, but this is what it looked like. Seeing the rings with my own eyes through my own telescope was amazing.

1976: Viking’s first pictures from the surface of Mars. I could finally see what it would really look like to be standing on another planet. ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

1979: I found the Voyager 1 image of Jupiter with its moons in the foreground utterly beautiful. With apologies to Pioneer, the Voyager image quality brought the outer solar system to life in vivid display like I had never imagined.

1994: When the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 slammed into Jupiter, just out of view of Earth, the internet was in its infancy. Astronomers everywhere, me included, kept refreshing our Netscape browsers to see what it looked like when the impact site rotated into view.

Yes, yes, sorry, I was referring more to the ability to have everything online available at the click of a mouse in a browser....