Coincidentally . . .

. . . a few hours after I'd finally given up battling with Blogspot to upload the video for this entry, I realised that Astronomy Picture of the Day has posted another video.

This one is a four-minute sequence of scenes speeded up to show the movement of the stars, the Moon, the Sun, meteorites, and many other beautiful night-and-day sights. And clouds feature heavily too. An astronomer's opinion of clouds was summed up rather well by BunnyBB back in the early days of Galaxy Zoo:

Clouds!! I love 'em and hate 'em in equal measures.
Hate 'em when I want to observe the night sky - :(
Love 'em rest of the time :)

It looks as if the zookeepers are having a few problems with clouds at present (not as badly as Chris did last time he missed Astrofest by going to Hawaii though). So I'm hoping they go away from Granada for a while so we can find out more about our merging galaxies. But I'll never forget going home from Geneva, a few days into the launch of the Galaxy Zoo Forum, and noticing a cloud that looked so much like a spiral galaxy that I reached for the mouse to classify it!


"The H2O Galaxy".

Happy New Year and clear skies for 2009!