As many of you know, I'm an amateur astrononer (fr. amare to love.) I poke around with a couple of small refractor telescopes, read Astronomy magazine, follow the exploration of our solar system and beyond, take photographs of the moon, read astronomy blogs, etc.
I'm sure you know that I'm also huge Firefox fan, and one of the guys that helps get Firefox releases out the door and into your hands.
Today, I'm pulling those two pieces together and the result is a desktop wallpaper based on the great Firefox logo from Silver Orange, and the great V838 Mon ASC photos from the Hubble Space Telescope.
In the early part of 2002, just about the time that the nacent m/b project (which would go on to become Phoenix, then Firebird, and now Firefox) was getting started, amateur and professional astronomers, across the globe were confirming the newly discovered V838 in Monocerotis.
Some months later, it was announced that this nova had a light echo which continued to grow in size as the original object faded from view. The light echo is an energized to glowing dust shell surrounding the star. The interaction between the energy coming off of the star and the surrounding dust scatters the light, making the entire object glitter and glow.
Just as V838 picked up steam, so did our browser project - skyrocketing to new heights with the release of Firefox 0.8. In March of this year, about a month after the 0.8 release, a final beautiful HST ACS photo of V838 was made Astronomy Picture of the Day where SkipK noted its similarity to the new Firefox logo and gave me the great idea to put these two together, resulting in my post on March 6.
Now, with lots of talk of Firefox wallpapers on #spreadfirefox and in the blogs at sfx, I decided to do a larger version for your desktop enhancing pleasure.
(Thanks to Stu for the image hosting. These are large files that would have killed my little account.)
