To my eye, this is one of the most beautiful patches of the night sky. CLICK on IMAGE above to view full-screen
A Stellar Nursery Next Door
At about 460 light-years away, Rho Ophiuchi is one of the closest star-forming regions to Earth — practically in our backyard, cosmically speaking. It’s dense with young stars still wrapped in the gas and dust they formed from, some barely a hundred thousand years old. A few of the youngest already have their own circumstellar disks — the raw material for future planets — which is part of why this region turns up in professional astronomy too.
From Starfront Observatories near Brady, Texas – IC 2118, the Witch Head Nebula, emerges from the cosmic darkness in not too far away in our nighttime sky from the famous Great Orion Nebula. This object, however, is a faint reflection nebula sitting approximately 900 light-years away, meaning the photons in this image began their journey around the year 1125 – during the height of the Crusades and the construction of Europe’s great cathedrals.
From Starfront Observatories near Brady, Texas – I caught a predator lurking in the depths of Cepheus. LDN 1235, better known as the Dark Shark Nebula, glides through a sea of stars approximately 650 light-years from Earth. The photons in this image left this cosmic nursery around the year 1375 – as the Renaissance was beginning to dawn in Europe and the Ming Dynasty was rising in China.
