Astronomy Picture of the Day

Explanation: If you could send a message to an alien civilization, what would you say? The people from the Cosmic Call project sent the above image as the first page of a longer message. The message was broadcast toward local stars by radio telescope during the summer of 1999. The single-dish, 70 metre diameter telescope is located in Ukraine on the Crimean peninsula near the town of Evpatoria. This first page involves only numbers and so is much easier for puzzle solvers to decode than a more famous message broadcast toward distant star cluster M13 in 1974. (The solution is here.)