A Nebula For Halloween

Here’s an astro-image for the holiday: the Witch Head Nebula lit up by blue supergiant Rigel. The Star Shadows Remote Observatory has a really nifty version on the Astronomy Picture of the Day site. Just to give some perspective, this interstellar cloud is about fifty light-years long, about the distance from here to the central stars of the Big Dipper. It would take the New Horizons probe to Pluto (the fastest probe ever launched by humans) about a million years to traverse the Witch Head chin to crown.