I notice that the hubblesite offers an RSS feed which also provides a tiny thumbnail jpg in the feed. Might someone post their ideas on how to hack the RDFparser in lib-common (I'm assuming that's what needs to be modified) to import and display this thumbnail? Slashdot has offered this for a long time I noticed.

The feed is here:
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/rss.php

I have it working, a hack is required. Each version of GL will need a different hack. Have a look at what RSS 2.0 wants to place the image. The version on that site required a hack to lib_common, I can share that with you if you want. I can see that it would be prudent to do this right, create a CONF variable in config,php to point to the image link, and then modify the RSS class php file in 3.11 to insert the proper tags.