BellaOnline Forums Education Astronomy Astro Greetings for the holiday season

The blog team for ESO's Rosetta mission have posted their holiday greetings in five languages.

If you still haven't sent Christmas cards, it's not too late for holiday greetings. E-greetings won't be too late - and remember that New Year is a holiday too. The Hubble Site has a lovely selection of designs that incorporate Hubble images into the seasonal theme. They can be printed in different sizes and have some hints for printing them. But you can also download the PDF and attach it to an email.

Holiday greetings from Commander Scott Kelly and his colleagues Tim Kopra and Tim Peake on the International Space Station. Kelly is nearing the completion of the ninth month of a year-long mission on the orbital laboratory, while Kopra and Peake arrived Dec. 15 to begin a six-month mission on the complex.

My greeting to Bellaonline readers was created by using My Galaxies, which "galactifies" your message with images of galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. These galaxies were classified by the Galaxy Zoo citizen science project.

I love it. Thank you so much. The stars are awesome.

Beautiful!

In 1968 the crew of Apollo 8 were the first people to get far enough away from Earth to see it as a sphere in space. They spent the Christmas of 1968 orbiting the Moon. They also made a live Christmas Eve broadcast which attracted what was then the biggest audience ever - up to a billion people. As they circled the desolate Moon and looked homeward to Earth, the three men read from the Book of Genesis.

Apollo 8 Christmas Eve broadcast

We all love little Pluto, and the New Horizons flyby was the astro event of the year! But Pluto is also for Christmas in this image where it's decked out in holiday colors.

Members of the New Horizons team took a pair of scans from the flyby and ran them through three color channels to create this Christmas portrait.

Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI