NGC 6334, Cat’s Paw

Making a Spectacle of Star Formation in Orion

Looking like a pair of eyeglasses only a rock star would wear, this nebula brings into focus a murky region of star formation. NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope exposes the depths of this dusty nebula with its infrared vision, showing stellar infants that are lost behind dark clouds when viewed in visible light.

Best known as Messier 78, the two round greenish nebulae are actually cavities carved out of the surrounding dark dust clouds. The extended dust is mostly dark, even to Spitzer’s view, but the edges show up in mid-wavelength infrared light as glowing, red frames surrounding the bright interiors. Messier 78 is easily seen in small telescopes in the constellation of Orion, just to the northeast of Orion’s belt, but looks strikingly different, with dominant, dark swaths of dust. Spitzer’s infrared eyes penetrate this dust, revealing the glowing interior of the nebulae.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Spitzer

The phases of Venus as it orbits the Sun, illustrated by John Emslie in Astronomical Diagrams, 1851.

Heart of the Northern Cross

The Milky Way as shot in Tasmania, Australia.

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“The shockwave from a 20,000 year-old supernova explosion in the constellation of Cygnus is still expanding into interstellar space. The collision of this fast moving wall of gas with a stationary cloud has heated it causing it to glow in visible as well as high energy radiation, producing the nebula known as the Cygnus Loop (NGC 6960/95). The nebula is located a mere 1,400 light-years away. The colors used here indicate emission from different kinds of atoms excited by the shock: oxygen-blue, sulfur-red, and hydrogen-green. This picture was taken with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 on board the Hubble Space Telescope.”

Photo by J Hester of ASU, description via NASA.

NGC 1999

Just south of the Orion nebula is a dense area of dust and gas forming stars, in fact, the first Herbig-Haro stars were located here, protostars pushing intense beams of matter out at the poles.

The mystery is the black blob in the white region, a reflective nebula from the star V380 Ori, but what is the dark patch ?

Originally it was thought to be a dense dark cloud of dust, hiding the light, however further analysis has found it is indeed a hole, made to look black in contrast to the bright reflective surroundings.

Massive cluster of galaxies: MACS J0416

NGC 6514, Trifid’s Unicorn

What do you get when you combine a doctor, engineer & astronaut? Mae Carol Jemison! Dr. Jemison flew on Space Shuttle Endeavour in Sept 1992 to become the 1st African-American woman in space. The 7-day, 22-hour flight was the 50th Shuttle mission & had a focus on conducting microgravity investigations in materials & life sciences. Dr. Jemison also holds an amazing 9 doctorates; don’t know how that’s humanly possible; getting my BA was tough enough!

The Snowman Nebula is an emission nebula that resides in the constellation Puppis in the southern sky, about 6,000 light-years away from Earth

Image credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Tan ; Processing; Gladys Kober