DUST·IN·SPACE

The Veil Nebula

2025-02-28T12:00:00Z

About 10,000 years ago, a massive star in the constellation Cygnus exploded. The shock wave from that detonation is still expanding — a shell of superheated gas roughly 130 light-years across, racing outward at over 600,000 km/h. The Veil Nebula is what that shock wave looks like today, 2,400 light-years from where you’re sitting. This wide-field image spans nearly 4 degrees of sky — about 8 times the width of the full Moon — capturing both the Eastern and Western Veil arcs in a single frame. The red filaments are hydrogen, heated and swept up by the expanding blast wave. The steel-blue threads are oxygen, glowing at a different wavelength. Neither is visible to the naked eye; each required hours of dedicated exposure through narrowband filters to reveal.

NGC 2070 — The Tarantula Nebula

2024-04-19T12:00:00Z

The Tarantula Nebula isn’t in our galaxy. It’s 161,000 light-years away, in the Large Magellanic Cloud — a satellite galaxy visible only from the southern hemisphere. Despite that distance, it’s so luminous that if it were as close as the Orion Nebula, it would cast shadows on the ground. At its core sits R136, a cluster of the most massive stars known — some over 100 times the mass of the Sun, burning through their fuel in a few million years. This is star formation on a scale our galaxy can’t match.

M101 — The Pinwheel Galaxy

2024-04-15T12:00:00Z

Twenty-one million light-years away — so far that the light in this image predates the entire evolutionary line that produced humans. The Pinwheel Galaxy is oriented almost perfectly face-on to us, revealing the full spiral structure that edge-on galaxies hide. The pink knots scattered along the arms are HII regions — clouds of hydrogen gas lit up by newborn stars. The blue patches are associations of young, hot stars. You’re looking at a galaxy roughly the size of the Milky Way, frozen in a moment 21 million years old.

The Flaming Star, Tadpole, and Spider Nebulae

2024-04-06T12:00:00Z

Three star-forming regions in the constellation Auriga, framed in a single wide-field exposure but at three very different distances along the same line of sight. The Flaming Star Nebula (IC 405, about 1,500 light-years away) glows around AE Aurigae — a runaway star ejected from the Orion region roughly 2.5 million years ago, currently passing through a cloud it has no connection to and ionizing it on the way. Eight thousand light-years deeper sits the Tadpole Nebula (IC 410), named for the two dense pillars of cooler gas surviving the radiation pressure of the embedded cluster NGC 1893 carving out its center. Further still is the Spider Nebula (IC 417, ~10,000 light-years), a smaller emission cloud cradling its own embedded cluster, NGC 1931. Three independent nurseries at three different stages of stellar life, captured together in eight hours of exposure across an eight-degree-wide patch of sky.

The Rosette Nebula

2024-03-20T12:00:00Z

A flower-shaped cloud of gas 130 light-years across, 5,200 light-years away in Monoceros. The Rosette Nebula surrounds the young open cluster NGC 2244, whose fierce stellar winds have blown a cavity in the center of the cloud — the “hole” in the flower. The surrounding petals are dense ridges of gas and dust being sculpted by radiation, and deep within them, new stars are condensing. The entire structure is slowly being blown apart by the same stars it created.

The Omega Nebula

2024-03-17T12:00:00Z

Five thousand five hundred light-years away in Sagittarius, a cloud of gas and dust roughly 15 light-years across is collapsing under its own gravity, forming new stars. The Omega Nebula (M17) is one of the brightest and most massive star-forming regions in the Milky Way — bright enough to see with binoculars, though most of its mass is hidden behind dark dust. The bright central bar and the sweeping curves of ionized gas are sculpted by radiation from young, hot stars embedded deep within the cloud.

The Great Orion Nebula

2024-02-14T12:00:00Z

Look at the constellation Orion on a clear night and find the three belt stars. Below them, in what appears to be the sword, there’s a faint fuzzy patch. That patch is the Orion Nebula — 1,344 light-years away, 24 light-years across, and one of the most active stellar nurseries in our region of the galaxy. Stars are being born inside it right now. The four bright stars at its core — the Trapezium — are less than a million years old, and their fierce ultraviolet radiation is ionizing the surrounding gas, creating the rose-colored glow visible even to the naked eye.

The Pleiades

2024-02-14T12:00:00Z

At 444 light-years, the Pleiades is one of the closest star clusters to Earth — close enough that you can see six or seven of its stars without a telescope on any clear winter night. The blue glow surrounding them isn’t leftover material from their birth. It’s a coincidence: the cluster is drifting through an unrelated cloud of interstellar dust, and the hot blue stars are lighting it up like headlights in fog. The cluster is young by stellar standards — about 100 million years old — and its stars will eventually drift apart over the next few hundred million years.

M51 — The Whirlpool Galaxy

2024-02-10T12:00:00Z

Twenty-three million light-years away in the constellation Canes Venatici, two galaxies are mid-collision. M51 — the Whirlpool — is the larger spiral, face-on to us, its arms still recognizable as arms. NGC 5195 is the smaller galaxy below it, distorted by the encounter and slowly being unwound. The pass that's currently warping both galaxies happened roughly 500 million years ago — the light reaching us now still records gas and dust ripped between them as gravity rearranges what each of them used to be. Lord Rosse's drawings of this pair in 1845 were the first time anyone had identified the spiral structure of a galaxy at all; he had no idea he was looking at the aftermath of a collision.

The Andromeda Galaxy

2024-02-03T12:00:00Z

The light that made this image left the Andromeda Galaxy 2.5 million years ago — before modern humans existed. It’s the nearest large galaxy to our own, and at six times the apparent width of the full Moon, it’s the most distant object visible to the naked eye. What you’re looking at is a trillion stars, sweeping dust lanes, and two satellite galaxies (M32 and M110) caught in its gravitational pull. Andromeda is approaching the Milky Way at 110 km/s. In about 4.5 billion years, the two will merge.