Tuesday, October 30, 2018

Space Can Be Spooky

An appropriate Halloween deep sky photo, this is a nebula cataloged as IC63 (for Index Catalog), seen in the direction of the north circumpolar constellation Cassiopeia.


The cloud looks like a ghost rising out of a foggy patch.  I see a head facing left, perhaps with a ridged helmet, and shoulders, and can follow it down to a body.  This is a portion of an image copyright Ken Crawford (Rancho Del Sol Obs.) and featured on the Astronomy Photo of the Day for the 26th.  To borrow from the description at APOD:
About 600 light-years distant, the clouds aren't actually ghosts, but they are slowly disappearing under the influence of energetic radiation from hot,luminous star gamma Cas. Gamma Cas is physically located only 3 to 4 light-years from the nebulae, just off the top right edge of the frame. Slightly closer to gamma Cas, IC 63 is dominated by red H-alpha light emitted as hydrogen atoms ionized by the star's ultraviolet radiation recombine with electrons. ... 
This was cropped from a larger photo at the APOD link. In that photo, the field of view spans about 1 degree or 10 light-years at the estimated distance of the field of view.  That would make this cropped view around 1/2 degree.


4 comments:

  1. You see clouds of gas 600 years distant in the photo. I see a huge space alien ghost that will arrive here in around 600 years to feast on the brains of humans. It's kind of an ink blot test.

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  2. Looks like one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse...only it looks like he's riding a camel.

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    1. Hmm. Not sure I see a camel. A horse with its head down?

      Wait... is that a beak? Maybe the horseman of the apocalypse is riding a giant kiwi bird!

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    2. Actually, I was going to write exactly that, but ended up thinking it was too ridiculous a vision!

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