2006: The Year In Astronomy

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The year 2006 was one of things lost and found. The solar system lost its former ninth planet and NASA lost a long-serving Mars probe, but scientists found good evidence for dark matter, signs of liquid water flows on present-day Mars, and a planet just a few times more massive than Earth around another star.
The year opened with the spectacular return to Earth on 15 January of the Stardust mission, which had spent years travelling to and from Comet Wild 2 to collect samples to be examined in the laboratory.
Early analysis of the samples led to the surprising finding that although the comets were formed in the frigid outer solar system, some of the building blocks must have been transported there from very close to the Sun, because they appear to have been heated above 1000°C.
In other comet news this year, the close passage of a disintegrating comet by the Earth in April gave astronomers a rare view of what may be a common fate for comets.

Planet crisis

Some say Pluto is just an overgrown comet, and the International Astronomical Union controversially voted to redefine the term "planet" in a way that excludes Pluto, relegating the former ninth planet to a second class of "dwarf planets".
Pluto's demotion was partly prompted by the confirmation earlier in the year that at least one object in the distant reaches of the solar system is bigger than Pluto. Initially called Xena, or the "tenth planet", it was given the official name Eris, after the Greek goddess of discord.
Amidst all the controversy, the New Horizons spacecraft continued towards its planned 2015 encounter with Pluto, following its January launch.

Land of lakes

NASA's Cassini spacecraft went on dazzling scientists and the general public with its investigation of Saturn and its moons. About 100 lakes of liquid...............................



Saturn’s rings glow especially bright in this enhanced-colour
mosaic from the Cassini spacecraft, assembled from images
taken while the Sun was hidden behind Saturn itself
(Image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute)

Continue Reading For much more

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Another link worth mentioning is:

The Top Ten Astronomy Images of 2006

Example:

Number 8: The Tarantula Writ Large
Our Milky Way Galaxy is a giant spiral collection of stars, gas, and dust. It has many smaller satellite galaxies, and one of them is the Large Magellanic Cloud, or LMC. The LMC is a fuzzy cloud-like object easily visible to the naked eye if you happen to be far enough south of the Equator (I saw it with my own eyes from Canberra, Australia in 2004). Through a telescope, though, the LMC is dominated by a cloud of gas called the Tarantula Nebula, perhaps the most active stellar nursery known.
You’ve probably seen images of the Orion Nebula, right? At 1500 light years away, it’s one of the brightest nebulae in the Milky Way, and is easily visible to the unaided eye. It’s about 30 light years across.
The Tarantula, however, is 160,000 light years away, and yet is still about as bright to the eye as the Orion Nebula. That’s because it’s frakking huge: it’s something like 1700 light years across, fifty times Orion’s size! If the Tarantula were placed at the distance of the Orion nebula, it would fill half the sky.
That’s big.
And so is this next image. The good folks at the European Southern Observatory stitched together several images of the Tarantula to make a mosaic of it that has 256 million pixels. Let’s see your store-bought camera do that!

This is a very, very compressed image of the big one. You could download an insanely monstrous 211 Mb 9000 x 8000 pixel image, but I recommend you go to their zoomable image of it instead