Did you know . . .

. . . that today is the anniversary of the Apollo 13 incident? In 1970 an explosion aboard the Apollo 13 spacecraft led to the most dramatic rescue in U.S. space history. The three astronauts -- Fred Haise, Jack Swigert, and Jim Lovell -- and thousands of NASA employees worked for four days to bring the astronauts home safe.

"There are people who make things happen, there are people who watch things happen, and there are people who wonder what happened. To be successful, you need to be a person who makes things happen." -- Jim Lovell

Astronomers select Top Ten most amazing pictures taken by Hubble Space telescope in the last 16 years (2006) . . . "our universe is not only deeply strange, but almost impossibly beautiful." -- Michael Hanlon

The Final Frontier

#1 . . . The Sombrero Galaxy -- 28 million light years from Earth. It has 800 billion sons and is 50,000 light years across.

#2 . . . The Ant Nebula, a cloud of dust and gas, resembles an ant when observed using ground-based telescopes . . . lies within our galaxy between 3,000 and 6,000 light years from Earth.

#3 . . . The Eskimo Nebula because it looks like a face surrounded by a furry hood, which is in fact a ring of comet-shaped objects flying away from a dying star . . . 5,000 light years from Earth.

#4 . . . The Cat's Eye Nebula.

#5 . . . The Hourglass Nebula has a pinched-in-the-middle look because the winds that shape it are weaker in the middle . . . 8,000 light years away.

#6 . . . The Cone Nebula. The part pictured here is 2.5 light years in length -- the equivalent of 23 million return trips to the Moon.

#7 . . . The Perfect Swan, a small region in the Swan Nebula . . . 5,500 light years away.

#8 . . . Starry Night, so named because it reminded astronomers of the Van Gogh painting. It is a halo of light around a star in the Milky Way.

#9 . . . The glowering eyes of from 114 million light years away are the swirling cores of two merging galaxies in the distant Canis Major constellation.

#10 . . . The Trifid Nebula, a stellar nursery, where new stars are being born . . . 9,000 light years from here.