Weirdtalesanduniverse-blog - Weird N' Wide Universe

Our Solar system

IC 1805 & IC 1848 // Heart & Soul Nebulae (left)

and

NGC 869 & NGC 884 // h & Chi Perseii // The Double Cluster (right)

Requested: Heleus Cluster

| Stranded |

NGC 3576 // Statue of Liberty Nebula

The beautiful Andromeda Galaxy is often imaged by planet Earth-based astronomers. Also known as M31, the nearest large spiral galaxy is a familiar sight with dark dust lanes, bright yellowish core, and spiral arms traced by blue starlight. A mosaic of well-exposed broad and narrow-band image data, this colorful, premier portrait of our neighboring island universe offers strikingly unfamiliar features though, faint reddish clouds of glowing ionized hydrogen gas in the same wide field of view. Still, the ionized hydrogen clouds likely lie in the foreground of the scene, well within our Milky Way Galaxy. They could be associated with the pervasive, dusty interstellar cirrus clouds scattered hundreds of light-years above our own galactic plane. If they were located at the 2.5 million light-year distance of the Andromeda Galaxy they would be enormous, since the Andromeda Galaxy itself is 200,000 or so light-years across.

Image Credit &Copyright:Rogelio BernalAndreo(Deep Sky Colors)

Time And Space

Few stars are visible such as the Andromeda galaxy. But the majority of the stars that you can observe with the naked eye are in this small area of the Milky Way.

RIP Stephen Hawking