Horsehead Nebula

A spiral galaxy almost 40 million light-years away, viewed edge-on. The dust lane in the center of its disk, and central bulge are clearly visible. A couple of its smaller, satellite galaxies can also be seen here.

As Halloween draws closer, this seems like an appropriate object to image: the “Witch’s Broom” nebula! Although to be honest, that bright star (Cygnus 56) looks more like an eye on some sort of fantastical, cosmic creature to me. In reality, it’s part of the larger Veil Nebula, which is a huge supernova remnant 1,400…

You’re looking at about 500,000 stars, balled up just outside of our galaxy. They are ancient; about 8 billion years old.

Globular clusters are mysterious objects – they are dense clusters of stars, some containing hundreds of thousands of them. And they’re not within the plane of the Milky Way galaxy; they are scattered around it. How they formed is a bit of a mystery. Did they form with our galaxy, or are they the cores…

It’s a good thing galaxies don’t have feelings; they’re just collections of billions of stars. Because NGC 2903 would need therapy. It has no cute nickname like other galaxies; it’s just NGC 2903. And it has no galactic neighbors; most galaxies are gravitationally bound to other galaxies in their local group or cluster, but NGC…

This portion of the Veil Nebula, commonly called the “Witch’s Broom,” is part of a larger shell of gas known as the Cygnus Loop. It’s gases blown off from a supernova that exploded 10,000 to 20,000 years ago! The rich red and blue colors are real; this is not a false color image. Shot over…