The Embryo Nebula
Maybe this isn’t the prettiest object in space, but it’s among the most interesting when you really look at it. The “Embryo Nebula” is a star-forming area, and you can really see it happening here. Those red streaks are Herbig-Haro objects, jets of gas shot out from spinning disks of gas that will become new solar systems. You can see the light of young stars blasting through the surrounding dust. And a nearby blue star lights up some of the gas, looking as though it was spat out from an orifice in the cloud of dust all of this comes from. Surrounding the nebula is lots of brown dust – if you’ve seen edge-on pictures of other galaxies, you’ll notice brown dust lanes going across them. That’s what you’re seeing here, but within our own galaxy.
Roughly 17 hours of total exposure, just in natural colors – no narrowband false color stuff, this is what it really looks like!
