Today I have two links for your viewing pleasure:

The first is the Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar 2009, brought to you by the always stunning Big Picture of the Boston Globe. The remarkable images taken by Hubble are simply some of the most jaw-dropping, awe-inspiring pictures I’ve ever seen; they are of an incomprehensible scale and a (literally) unearthly beauty. Of course, there are plenty of sites where you can see all the Hubble pictures you want all at once, but I like the advent calendar idea, and I’ll be checking back regularly to see which pics have made it into this year’s selection.

For pictures a little closer to home—taken on planet Earth, in any case—I recommend checking out Pictory, a lovely site which combines big photos and small stories to very good effect. Anyone is invited to submit a photo with a caption relating to one of several themes, and the best photos and captions are then chosen for a showcase on the site.

The current showcase, Overseas and Overwhelmed, offers “25 stories of culture shock”, some funny/odd, some quite touching. Funnily enough, I think one of the photos was taken in the restaurant downstairs in the hotel we stayed at in Shinjuku, Tokyo, where you catch your own fish in the restaurant’s “pond.” We (stupidly) never went into the restaurant, assuming it was a tourist trap (which it probably is, but still…), but we did go to a different restaurant one night where we got a similar plate of sashimi from a fish which had been alive very, very shortly before it arrived at the table (if not when it actually reached the table).

Several of the pictures in this showcase brought up travel memories of my own and prompted me to look back through the travel photos I’ve taken over the past years, some of which I’m rather proud of. So I’ll be keeping an eye on Pictory, and maybe I’ll even submit something of my own someday.