Posted on 10/04/2020 3:28:35 PM PDT by MtnClimber
Explanation: Few astronomical sights excite the imagination like the nearby stellar nursery known as the Orion Nebula. The Nebula's glowing gas surrounds hot young stars at the edge of an immense interstellar molecular cloud. Many of the filamentary structures visible in the featured image are actually shock waves - fronts where fast moving material encounters slow moving gas. The Orion Nebula spans about 40 light years and is located about 1500 light years away in the same spiral arm of our Galaxy as the Sun. The Great Nebula in Orion can be found with the unaided eye just below and to the left of the easily identifiable belt of three stars in the popular constellation Orion. The image shows the nebula in three colors specifically emitted by hydrogen, oxygen, and sulfur gas. The whole Orion Nebula cloud complex, which includes the Horsehead Nebula, will slowly disperse over the next 100,000 years.
For more detail go to the link and click on the image for a high definition image. You can then zoom by moving the magnifying glass over an area and then clicking. The side bars will move the zoomed area over the photograph.
To me it looks like a parrot with a cheeseburger on it’s head. You will need to search more to find the cats.
I’ll take whatever you’re smoking.
Pinging the APOD list.
Can see a bird with map of Australia above it ( Tasmania joined to mainland, as it once was)
Awesome!
Absolutely love the last picture.
Everything looks so close... Yet one inch or a little more is equal to a THOUSAND light years.
I wonder if mankind will ever get the technology to even explore our own “inch” of the Orion arm, let alone the rest?
Having pored over hundreds of Sky & Telescope issues in the 60s and 70s I’m incredulous at the complexity of nebulae and galaxies. Even if the various spectra are color enhanced, which I doubt, the details are real. What an amazing universe.
No one has found the cats yet?
A Putin-faced bear contemplating a globe, other hand in a fist?
“Having pored over hundreds of Sky & Telescope issues in the 60s and 70s I’m incredulous at the complexity of nebulae and galaxies.”
Nice to see another S&T subscriber here. I consider myself the worlds worst amateur astronomer. Can’t really see any detail or anything but Orion is there for just the naked eye. Not sure what else other than the planets is like that.
Thanks for posting these threads.
I love astronomy and the beauty of it is breathtaking.
*The heavens declare the glory of God.....*
I’ll bet it smells awful!
Well, I was going to hold off on making any comment after “Zoot Suit Wolf,” but since you raised the issue!
In the top first picture I can see what might be a cat, but to me it looks more like a bear, two eyes, nose, ears….There is something that looks like a female moose (no antlers)standing on its right cheek, head up. The Bears right paw is holding a Greek God (head at about 45 degrees, curly hair) one arm back one arm out in front. Something has happened to the Bear’s right paw, which is just a stump…However! There is an ocean sloshing over the top of his left leg! A tiny tall ship appears about to sail over the waves on the top of leg. In between his legs is either a skinny coyote, or an asparagus headed tree man.
Leonardo DaVince writes:
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/978797-look-at-walls-splashed-with-a-number-of-stains-or
“Look at walls splashed with a number of stains, or stones of various mixed colours. If you have to invent some scene, you can see there resemblances to a number of landscapes, adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, great plains, valleys and hills, in various ways. Also you can see various battles, and lively postures of strange figures, expressions on faces, costumes and an infinite number of things, which you can reduce to good integrated form. This happens on such walls and varicoloured stones, (which act) like the sound of bells, in whose peeling you can find every name and word that you can imagine.
Do not despise my opinion, when I remind you that it should not hard for you to stop sometimes and look into the stains of walls, or the ashes of a fire, or clouds, or mud or like places, in which, if you consider them well, you may find really marvelous ideas. The mind of the painter is stimulated to new discoveries, the composition of battles of animals and men, various compositions of landscapes and monstrous things, such as devils and similar things, which may bring you honor, because by indistinct things the mind is stimulated to new inventions.”
(Psalm 19 is appropriate here....!)
Looking up at the night sky out here in the sticks, away from most of the light pollution of the cities, is wonderful. Yet, looking at the Belt of Orion from the ground is light-years different (pardon the pun) from the magnificence of the pics you’re posted.
Thanks again for your work on the APOD threads. I look forward every day to seeing what wonders you’re going to show us.
great photo, bump to add reference- overlay of US map on similar scale... later...
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