The Christmas decorations are appearing in the stores, along with a selection of yuletide gift wraps, cards, place settings, etc. So Halloween must be coming along soon!

Halloween

Halloween falls midway between an equinox and a solstice. In the ancient Celtic world it was the new year's eve and start of winter - time to prepare for survival in the darkening days. But also a time when the boundary between our world and the otherworld weakened. Who knew what might cross it?

The Witch Head Nebula. It's catalogued as IC2118, but it does rather look like the profile of a stereotypical witch. She's looking towards the bright star Rigel in the constellation Orion. The nebula doesn't give out any light on its own, but it's illuminated by Rigel.

pretty neat.

Is this a cosmic witch's preferred transportation? It's NGC 6960, also known as the [i]Witch Broom[/i], a part of the Veil Nebula, a supernova remnant about 9000 years old.

Credit: Fred Herrmann, Owl Mountain Observatory on Blue Mountain in Huntsville, Alabama. Photo dated 2013.

Cosmic Halloween Tour

Join me on a Halloween astronomical tour. See a cosmic witch and cosmic ghosts, spiders and snakes, and fiery skull. But have no fear. It's a virtual tour and all these objects are a very long way away.

Spectral hand and ring of fire?

No, it's pulsar PSR B1509-58, a spinning neutron star imaged by the Chandra X-ray Observatory. It's located in the constellation Circinus. The rapid spin is sending charged matter into a strongly magnetized nebula, and creating these amazing shapes.

Wow, amazing picture!

Mona, Nancy, WOW is right - incredible.

Here is apparently a ghostly apparition. Although it looks like the popular image of a ghost, it's actually the nebula vdB 152, a reflection nebulae where dust is absorbing red light and scattering blue light from nearby stars.

Here is the Ghost Nebula (vdB 141), which is a strangely unsettling vision. It's a reflection nebula in the constellation Cepheus. The light of stars embedded in the nebula give it the brown color that looks a bit liked dried blood. (Image credit: Ivan dot astroeder)

Wow! These two pictures are spectacular! I am always amazed when I see any type of images of our galaxy and beyond!

Cosmic Ghosts Ghouls and Vampires

Astronomers use colorful language for cosmic objects. But unlike ghosts, ghouls and vampires in horror stories, the cosmic ones aren't scary late at night. Here are tales of the birth, evolution and death of stars, a blinking demon and a star that, at Halloween, seems like the Sun's ghost.

Fiery skull. It looks like something in torment, but it's an X-Ray image of the Perseus Cluster of Galaxy. We're not seeing the galaxies themselves, just the X-rays given out by the gas between the galaxies.

The Astronomy Picture of the Day offers up the Ghost Head Nebula for Halloween. This is NGC 2080 taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. It looks as though the ghostly figure has two glowing eyes, but it's actually a star=forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. The nebula is about fifty light years across.

For Halloween Night the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) offered us a ghostly aurora over Canada.



Image Credit & Copyright: Yuichi Takasaka, TWAN