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.

About catholicsensibility

Todd lives in Minnesota, serving a Catholic parish as a lay minister.
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2 Responses to A Nebula For Halloween

  1. Fran says:

    I love when you post these things. I am taking a grad course on the sacraments and we started by looking at the cosmos as the primary sacrament.

    One of our first assignments was to spend time with google sky.

  2. Anne says:

    I see Abraham Lincoln!

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