Nebulae are titanic clouds of gas and dust – celestial gossamer in the spaces between the stars. They're stellar nurseries, stellar graveyards and dark constellations. Some of their mysteries have been penetrated by infrared telescopes, but the cloaking dust still keeps some secrets.

Nebulae

Have a look at Simeis 147 nicknamed the Spaghetti Nebula. It's about 3000 light years away on the border between the constellations Auriga and Taurus and around 150 light years across. The nebula is a remnant from a supernova explosion that happened some 40,000 years ago. In addition to the expanding debris of the remnant, there is a neutron star formed from the core of the original massive star.

Image Credit & Copyright: Daniel López / IAC

Oh wow!

The Horsehead Nebula lies some 1500 light years away in the constellation Orion. The black silhouette resembling a horse's head is made up of dense gas and dust. It's known as a dark nebula and is visible because it blocks the light from background stars.

The red nebula is an emission nebula - it glows red because hydrogen gas emits red light when it's energized by nearby hot stars. A blue nebula is a reflection nebula, preferentially reflecting the blue part of the spectrum from nearby stars. On the left hand side of this image is the Flame Nebula.

Williamina Fleming, working at Harvard College Observatory, discovered the Horsehead Nebula in 1888. May 15 this year marked the 160th anniversary of Fleming's birth.

Image Credit & Copyright: José Jiménez Priego

Wow!

Have a look at at the Horseshoe Bend of the Colorado River. But where did the ray of white light in the center come from that seems to go upward from the central horizon? That's a band of dust in the inner Solar System that reflects light from the inner Solar System - it's called zodiacal dust.



If you were there with a good telescope, what would you be seeing in the night sky?

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/1705/HorseShoeSky_Lane_960_annotated.jpg

Amazing!

It's the intriguing Soap Bubble Nebula located off in the constellation Cygnus the Swan. It's so newly recognized that it hasn't been been properly catalogued yet. It's probably a planetary nebula, a type of nebula formed when a dying sunlike star sloughs off its outer layers.

Credit & Copyright: T. Rector (U. Alaska Anchorage), H. Schweiker (WIYN), NOAO, AURA, NSF

As usual all I can say is wow!

From ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile comes this image of reflection nebula M78. It's located about 1400 light years away in the constellation Orion. A reflection nebula is always blue whatever the color of the star whose light it reflects. The reflection is off the dust which scatters the blue part of the light spectrum more efficiently than the red.

Credit: ESO/Igor Chekalin

Wow!

A Chandra X-ray image of the supernova remnant N132D. Since we aren't like Superman with X-ray vision, unaided we couldn't see the exquisite structure in this nebula. The colors represent different X-ray energies, "red, green, and blue representing, low, medium, and higher X-ray energies respectively."

A supernova remnant is formed mostly from the debris of the tremendous explosion that signaled the end of a massive star that had run out of fuel.

Credit: NASA/SAO/CXC

Wow. What kind of strange sea creature is this? OK, it's really a planetary nebula, but it looks like a sea creature to me.

Here's the story:

Credit: Robert Rubin (NASA/ESA Ames Research Center), Reginald Dufour and Matt Browning (Rice University), Patrick Harrington (University of Maryland), and NASA/ESA

Here is NGC 7635, the Bubble Nebula. It's small and delicately bubble-like, and in this image just to the left of center of the large complex of gas and dust. It's located about 11,000 light years away on the boundary between the constellations Cepheus and Cassiopeia. Look to the lower left to see M52, an open star cluster about 5000 light years away.

Image Credit & Copyright: Rolf Geissinger

beautiful.

This is emission nebula Thor's Helmet Emission Nebula NGC 2359. It's about 12,000 light years away in the constellation Canis Major.

Image Credit & Copyright: Adam Block, Mt. Lemmon SkyCenter, U. Arizona

A work of art, a beautiful painting. Or so it seems. It's a bit of the Orion Nebula, highlighting the young star LL Orionis. A nebula, like puffy clouds on Earth, looks like a fluffy tranquil place. But like earthly clouds, it's not, it's turbulent. The star produces an energetic outflow of particles, called a stellar wind. As this fast wind hits the nebula's slow-moving gas, it forms a bow shock, which you can see just above the star. It's about half a light year across.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team

This is a planetary nebula called the Red Spider Nebula (officially NGC 6537). (I don't think it looks like a spider, but obviously someone did.) The nebula is the result of an ordinary star like the Sun ejecting its outer layers as it's running out of fuel. The star finally becomes a white dwarf. NGC 6537 is located in Sagittarius (the Archer), maybe around 4000 light years away - astronomers can't be certain.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble, HLA; Reprocessing & Copyright: Jesús M.Vargas & Maritxu Poyal

The Cat's Paw Nebula (NGC 6334) must belong to a very big cat since the paw is some 40 light years across. It's an emission nebula and star-forming region located in the constellation Scorpius, discovered by astronomer John Herschel in 1837, who observed it from the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. The red color comes from energized hydrogen.

Image Credit: George Varouhakis

Here is the Blue Horsehead Nebula is a reflection nebula in the constellation Scorpius.

Image Credit & Copyright: Scott Rosen

The Helix Nebula (NGC 7293). This planetary nebula in the constellation Aquarius is one of the nearest to Earth. A planetary nebula is nothing to do with a planet. It's created when a sunlike star is dying and sloughing off its outer layers. Some of them appeared to have a disk like a planet in early telescopes.

Copyright NASA, NOAO, ESA, the Hubble Helix Nebula Team, M. Meixner (STScI), and T.A. Rector (NRAO)

The Robin's Egg Nebula (NGC 1360) is located about 1500 light years away in the constellation Fornax. It's a planetary nebula, formed from a dying star, or in this case, probably a binary system. "Their intense and otherwise invisible ultraviolet radiation has stripped away electrons from the atoms in the surrounding gaseous shroud. The predominant blue-green hue of NGC 1360 seen here is the strong emission produced as electrons recombine with doubly ionized oxygen atoms."

Image Credit & Copyright: Josep Drudis, Don Goldman

Behold! A splendid collection of planetary nebulae. A planetary nebula forms when a sun-sized star is coming to the end of its life and slough off its outer layers. As you can see, planetary nebulae come in all sorts of shapes.

The Cat's Eye Nebula (NGC 6543) is a planetary nebula located three thousand light years away in the constellation Draco (the Dragon).


Image Credit: NASA, ESA, HEIC, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Description: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)

Is this an incredibly beautiful nebula or what? It's called Supernova Remnant HBH 3, which seems a bit mundane for such a splendid sight!

The technical details for those interested:


Image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Credit: NASA/JPL