The harvest of scientific information is remarkable. Cosmologists are getting their first looks at events shortly after the Big Bang. Basic laws of physics are being questioned. Planets are being remade before our remote-control eyes.

In fact researchers say much of the data in pictures has yet to be mined, and a new technique called virtual astronomy has emerged, using software to mine old photos for new information.

Earthlings are building a pictorial database of the cosmos faster than they can process it, not to mention a mighty impressive photo album of places they may never visit.

"On a clear day in the universe you can see forever," says Ray Villard, who should know.

Villard has spent the past decade helping the world see a new universe through the eyes of the Hubble Space Telescope. Villard is the news director for the Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates the telescope.

Hubble and other modern eyepieces have shown us that the farther out we look, the stranger things get. And there seems to be no end to the variety. Even among like objects, such as nebulae, "no two are alike," Villard said.

Villard is one of a handful of people around the country who see space before the rest of us. Image processors, curators, scientists and public information folks who decide what images to process, print, study and release.

Jurrie Van der Woude is another one of these lucky few.

In 1963, Van der Woude started choosing space images that scientists would examine and that the public would marvel over. He worked for 13 years at the California Institute of Technology, which operates the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for NASA. He then continued his role as gatekeeper of cosmic pictures as a JPL employee until happily working himself out of a job as the Internet emerged.

In the old days, much of Van der Woude's time involved late-night work, picking images from the Voyager spacecraft that would be released to the press the following morning. Pictures were beamed to Earth at an agonizingly slow rate back then, and often impatience dictated that Van der Woude make decisions after seeing only 30 percent of a photo on his computer screen.

He learned to spot the ones that "look as sexy as possible and have the maximum amount of science included," he said in a recent telephone interview from his home near JPL.

Van der Woude will not be cornered in choosing an all-time favorite image because, he says, each new mission generates new favorites.

"Those very first looks ... you say, 'Oh my God, it's very different than I thought it would be.' And then the next spacecraft that goes out shows you the same planet, but it's a brand new one, because each spacecraft builds on the experience of the previous one."

Van der Woude explained how he digitized himself out of a job. The Challenger disaster in 1986 brought on a delay in several missions that were due to launch from a shuttle bay. Photo opportunities dried up, and so did the budget Van der Woude used to process and mail 8x10-inch glossies to journalists and science textbook writers.

"For about two years, I was the SOB of this planet," he said. "Boy did I have an awful lot of people mad at me."

Years later, the problem still not fixed, a couple of textbook authors complained to a science advisor of Al Gore, as well as to NASA chief Dan Goldin.

Goldin called Ed Stone, then the director of JPL.

"So I got called on the carpet," Van der Woude recalls. A solution was needed. So he sat down with some colleagues to dream one up. The result was the Planetary Photojournal, an Internet-based system for electronically releasing and housing space imagery.

"Now I've worked away my own job," he said. "And that was the best thing that could ever happen. In the old days, you'd have 25 or 30 beautiful images laying on the desk, and you'd have to pick up four or five to hand to the press. Now you dump them all online."

The result is a veritable overload of images in recent years -- more than 67,000 alone from the Mars Orbiter Camera aboard the Mars Global Surveyor, currently orbiting the Red Planet.

With such a bounty of photographs past and present it is impossible for anyone to agree on a list of the 10 best -- or most important, or most intriguing, or most beautiful -- space science images of all time.

And forget it if you begin to include human space exploration and pictures of footprints on the Moon.

But Van der Woude made a living by picking images the world would see of our cosmic backyard, a job that framed an entire generation's perception of our solar system. Villard, on the other hand, has intimate knowledge of things that are light-years away. In Hubble's phenomenal deep-space gallery, Villard knows which pictures are the most requested, which inspire the most awe.

So we asked these two veteran image pickers to choose the pictures they think represent the best, most intriguing, most scientifically important space science images ever to come from their respective domains.

The resulting 10 photographs are a tribute to collective human curiosity and the exploratory spirit that propels our minds and eyes ever further beyond this planet. Even if we don't go ourselves.