astronomy, a picture is worth more than a thousand words. It offers the secrets of the universe. From pictures taken of the skies at different times and locations, and from spectra visible and invisible to the human eye, astronomers coax the secrets as to how a universe, billions of years in the making, was born, expands, and perhaps ultimately dies. But like a neglected family photo album, pages are missing from astronomy's observational history. Decades of images have become dispersed among observatories and the private files of thousands of astronomers. Finding and acquiring copies of these large data image files can be difficult. Worse, the images are easily lost or rendered unusable by outmoded technology. To rebuild astronomy's observational history and make images more accessible to astronomers and the public, the Astronomy Group at NCSA is building a Web-based digital library. More than a collection of pictures, the new online library is an interactive database of images and research abstracts. It includes a unique cataloging system, a Java previewer, a VRML tool for automatically generating 3D images, and after only one year, more than 4,000 2D and 3D images representing every field of astronomy. No need to settle for the moon when you can have the universe.