I have a long and thin image in the header section of my website.
Its a city night view.
height = 150px, width = 960px.

To give my site a little bit of sparkle i would like to use some kind of
javascript effect to display the image when it loads.

For example, progressively revealing from left to right (not sliding)
or something a bit more interesting would be good.

I DONT want to use Flash.

Preferably Jquery but any of the main libraries is Ok.

Have you ever used jQuery's native fadeIn() method? It works like this:

<script>
$("#myimage").fadeIn("fast");
</script>

You may want to check out the cycle plugin for jQuery. Although it may be a bit heavy for your purposes, it is a cool plugin and has a lot of neat transition effects.

When I want single custom transitions, I usually plug them in to jQuery's animate() method, using an object literal if several effects are needed at once. The nice thing about animate() is that any CSS property that relies on a quantity may be transitioned at the defined pace of the function.

Hello,

There is a great deal of JavaScripts to pick from on http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex4/index.html