Astronomy Picture of the Day

Very cool- thanks Maj William W. 'Bill' Price

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Looking at this particular image, one might gather that it is an area of dense dust particles...yet it is possibly the result of an exploding star within the constellation Gemini. Space has not unfolded all of her secrets, so we must look through the lenses that provide the image depth and analyse what we see so that we possibly may understand just a spec more of our universe and its depth so many parsecs all around our little planet Earth within the Milky Way... To illustrate, one of the Billions of galaxies in our wide universe is our sister galaxy, Andromeda, and it is ~ 2.537 million light years from our Earth, while the Jellyfish Nebula is ~ 4,892 light years away. Wow!

Good day, my friend Maj William W. 'Bill' Price and thank you for continuing your daily series of NASA image posts. In this case it is focused on "Sharpless 249 and the Jellyfish Nebula."
It is great that those who name nebula, etc have a great sense of humor :-)
"Explanation: Normally faint and elusive, the Jellyfish Nebula is caught in this alluring telescopic field of view. The entire scene is a two panel mosaic constructed using narrowband image data, with emission from sulfur, hydrogen and oxygen atoms shown in red, green and blue hues. It's anchored right and left by two bright stars, Mu and Eta Geminorum, at the foot of the celestial twin. The Jellyfish Nebula itself is right of center, the brighter arcing ridge of emission with dangling tentacles. In fact, the cosmic jellyfish is part of bubble-shaped supernova remnant IC 443, the expanding debris cloud from a massive star that exploded. Light from the explosion first reached planet Earth over 30,000 years ago. Like its cousin in astrophysical waters the Crab Nebula supernova remnant, the Jellyfish Nebula is known to harbor a neutron star, the remnant of the collapsed stellar core. An emission nebula cataloged as Sharpless 249 fills the field at the upper left. The Jellyfish Nebula is about 5,000 light-years away. At that distance, this image would be about 300 light-years across."

Image: Sharpless 249 and the Jellyfish Nebula. Image Credit & Copyright: Data - Steve Milne & Barry Wilson, Processing - Steve Milne

Thank you, my friend Maj Marty Hogan for mentioning me.
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