Cool Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD)

Yesterday I saw an absolutely awesome picture on APOD from the recent vulcanic eruption on Iceland with lightning coming out of the huge ash and fire cloud.

Pictured: awesome

Click the image to read the description at the APOD site.


And the volcano is still spewing out ashes (although the air space was opened again today).

The picture above is from the April 19th and was taken by ESA's Envisat satellite and it shows a 400 km long ash cloud going in a south easterly direction from the volcano (click the image to read description).

If you want to see how the volcanic eruption looks from close up (and a little above), you can see a short (1½ min) aerial video of the eruption here.