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APOD
Astronomy Picture of the Day
Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
Stars Over Easter Island
Explanation: Why were the statues on Easter Island built? No one is sure. What is sure is that over 800 large stone statues exist there. The Easter Island statues , stand, on the average, over twice as tall as a person and have over 200 times as much mass. Few specifics are known about the history or meaning of the unusual statues , but many believe that they were created about 500 years ago in the images of local leaders of a lost civilization. Pictured above , a large stone statue appears to ponder the distant Large Magellanic Cloud before a cloudy sky that features the bright stars Canopus and Sirius .
| Date | October 12, 2009 |
|---|---|
| Credit | Credit & Copyright: Stéphane Guisard (Los Cielos de Chile), TWAN |
| Authors & editors: | Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP) |
| A service of: |
ASD at NASA / GSFC, NASA Science Activation & Michigan Tech. U. |