Starship Asterisk*

NGC 1333 Stardust

Explanation: NGC 1333 is seen in visible light as a reflection nebula, dominated by bluish hues characteristic of starlight reflected by dust. A mere 1,000 light-years distant toward the heroic constellation Perseus, it lies at the edge of a large, star-forming molecular cloud. This striking close-up view spans about two full moons on the sky or just over 15 light-years at the estimated distance of NGC 1333. It shows details of the dusty region along with hints of contrasting red emission from Herbig-Haro objects, jets and shocked glowing gas emanating from recently formed stars. In fact, NGC 1333 contains hundreds of stars less than a million years old, most still hidden from optical telescopes by the pervasive stardust. The chaotic environment may be similar to one in which our own Sun formed over 4.5 billion years ago.

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It is DARK MOTHRA....attacking Tokyo....where else???

Another wonderful shot of this interesting area.
Lots going on...

Going to need my broom....the work just keep piling up.

:---[===] *

Thanks for posting this and especially yesterday's pictures; they are stunning. I have to get HQ prints of them. APOD starts my day off with a peaceful perspective of our place in the universe. Despite all the self-made idiocy on this planet, it's still possible --- or even necessary --- to realize the beauty of the cosmos.

rghoeing@buffalo.edu wrote:Thanks for posting this and especially yesterday's pictures; they are stunning. I have to get HQ prints of them. APOD starts my day off with a peaceful perspective of our place in the universe. Despite all the self-made idiocy on this planet, it's still possible --- or even necessary --- to realize the beauty of the cosmos.

Great post!!! Couldnt have said it better myself.

What an awe inspiring shot today's is!!

I propose the name "Heaven and Hell Nebula" for this region of space. The bright blue reflection nebula exudes the beauty and glory associated with Heaven. The juxtaposition with the dark smoky swirling knot complete with orange embers evokes a dark and foreboding place.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VezW1PtDq5E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s1YVwGCgik
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbRQO4LDLYM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCJ5E8AnlWk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2fbOAyNOpM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvhq3V8ZhTA

This is a lovely picture, very detailed. Unlike yesterday's APOD, this is a more or less true color image, meaning that the colors that you can see in it are reasonably close to what our human eyes would see, if our eyes were many times more sensitive than they are to incredibly faint colors.

Sky Catalogue 2000.0 Volume 2 describes NGC 1333 as a bright nebula whose color is "B" for "Blue". Unlike the various nebulosities surrounding the sisters of the Pleiades, the reflection nebula of NGC 1333 isn't "VB" for "Very Blue".

NGC 1333 looks like a small, low-mass site of star formation. There appear to be exactly two stars in it that are massive and hot enough to be blue, namely HIP 16243, which sits immediately to the left of the massive dust feature, and an unnamed and unclassified star ( at least unknown and unclassified by my software), which is creating all the conspicuous blue reflection nebulosity.

The dust feature contains a lot of little yellowish and reddish nebulas as well as little orange-red dots of light. All these little light are likely produced by low-mass stars, some of which throw their tiny little tantrums and create their diminutive little Ha nebulas.

I can't help quoting Shakespeare here:

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances;

Here the newborn stellar runts are the little players, making their entrances along with their own tiny little mayhems, until after trillions of years they will make their exits, possibly with a whimper. It could well be that all this play in several excruciatingly long acts will not signify much, and perhaps it will signify nothing.

Maybe. But for now, the stage, as it is laid out for us in this APOD, is really very, very beautiful.

Ann

Oh my - that is just lovely!

Help I'm confused !
APOD: 2010 March 30 - Unusual Starburst Galaxy NGC 1313 in Reticulum.
APOD 2014 March 06 - reflection nebula NGC 1313 towards Perseus ???

CygnusOB2 wrote:Help I'm confused !
APOD: 2010 March 30 - Unusual Starburst Galaxy NGC 1313 in Reticulum.
APOD 2014 March 06 - reflection nebula NGC 1313 towards Perseus ???

APOD 2014 March 06 - reflection nebula NGC 1333 towards Perseus

neufer wrote:

CygnusOB2 wrote:Help I'm confused !
APOD: 2010 March 30 - Unusual Starburst Galaxy NGC 1313 in Reticulum.
APOD 2014 March 06 - reflection nebula NGC 1313 towards Perseus ???

APOD 2014 March 06 - reflection nebula NGC 1333 towards Perseus

This is the real reason we give faint fuzzies evocative names based on what they looked like to somebody who had been up all night drinking too much coffee and staring through a telescope. Much easier than remembering all those pesky numbers. "Heaven and Hell nebula!" Bring it.

Coffee, way back then?? More like Grog, me thinks.

Beyond wrote:Coffee, way back then?? More like Grog, me thinks.

From Wikipedia... "Coffee cultivation first took place in southern Arabia; the earliest credible evidence of coffee-drinking appears in the middle of the 15th century in the Sufi shrines of Yemen."

Rob

rstevenson wrote:

Beyond wrote:Coffee, way back then?? More like Grog, me thinks.

From Wikipedia... "Coffee cultivation first took place in southern Arabia; the earliest credible evidence of coffee-drinking appears in the middle of the 15th century in the Sufi shrines of Yemen."

Rob

There were only a handful of nebulae identified as such, prior to the invention of the telescope in the 1600s, by which time, coffee was becoming popular in Europe.

See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebula#Obs ... al_history

Thanks folks..
Message to self : Do not look at APOD immediately after an afternoon Siesta !