Earth seen from STS 118
Here are some great resources I’ve found to update your desktop wallpaper. Of course, I’m only going to focus on space and astronomy related wallpapers, since that’s all I like to have as my desktop wallpaper.
First, let’s start with NASA-related sites. There are many official NASA sites with wallpapers, but one of the newest ones is a service provided by Archive.org called NASA Images. It’s hard to say, but it looks like they’ve got more than 100,000 NASA images of the Solar System, spacecraft, and astronomical objects. They don’t give you specific images that have been cut down into wallpaper sizes (1024×768), etc, but most images will work well.
Now, here are some more services from NASA. Check out the NASA homepage. They have a new picture every day featured. If you click through to the specific image, you’ll see there are options to download images in various desktop wallpaper resolutions. So, you could put in a new one every day.
Next there’s the NASA Image Exchange. This is a huge database that lets you download thousands of images of anything NASA has ever photographed. The interface is a little technical, and the images are provided in just a few resolutions, so you might not get a perfect fit on your desktop.
There’s the JSC Digital Image Collection. These are images taken as part of NASA’s human spaceflight efforts, so you’re going to see a lot of astronauts, space shuttles and so on.
If you just want images of our home planet, check out NASA Visible Earth. Again, they don’t make wallpaper specific resolution images, but they’re really nice. And there’s another similar resource called the NASA Earth Observatory.
Now, let’s find some pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope. There are two main sites for accessing Hubble images. There’s the Hubblesite, and the Hubble Heritage Gallery. There are other great space telescopes too. Like Chandra and the Spitzer Space Telescope.
Want pictures of the planets? No problem. Here are images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the Mars Exploration Rovers, Mars Express, and Mars Odyssey. You can see pictures of Mercury from MESSENGER, Saturn from Cassini, Venus from Venus Express.
There… that should keep you busy.
We’ve also got lots of pictures of space here on Universe Today. Here are some pictures of Mars, and here are some pictures of Jupiter.
We have also recorded many episodes of Astronomy Cast about the Solar System. Start our tour through the Solar System here at Episode 49: Mercury.
Fraser Cain is the publisher of Universe Today. He's also the co-host of Astronomy Cast with Dr. Pamela Gay. He's the forum co-administrator of the Bad Astronomy/Universe Today forum with Bad Astronomer Phil Plait.
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