Laughing Boy wrote:
] WOW!
]
] LB

yeah, always loved the APOD. interesting to note, from the About APOD page :

"In real life, Bob and Jerry are two professional astronomers who spend most of their time researching the universe. Bob is an associate professor at Michigan Technological University in Houghton, Michigan, USA, while Jerry is a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland USA. They are two married, mild, and lazy guys who might otherwise appear normal to an unsuspecting guest. Together, they have found new and unusual ways of annoying their wives such as staging astronomical debates. Most people are surprised to learn that they have developed the perfect random number generator."

i'm not sure who wrote that, or how accurate it is (they don't make any claim of perfection), but here's the referenced site, for all you math and crypto nerds (he mentions use as pseudorandom numbers in the second short paragraph) : http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/htmltest/rjn_dig.html

RE: The Eskimo Nebula from Hubble