What better way to launch Space Sunday than by featuring the little piece of heaven depicted in my blog banner?
Meet The Seahorse of the Large Magellanic Cloud.
Commonly referred to as The Seahorse Nebula, this sparkling piece of space is part of the Large Magellanic Cloud. The "seahorse" is actually a pillar of smoky dust that is approximately 20 light years long. Long. Can you imagine that? If you look just above the "neck" area of the seashore, you'll see the sparkliest star in the photo. This is the center of NGC 2074, a star cluster being formed by this energetic nebula. This picture was taken in honor of Hubble's 100,000th trip around the Earth by the telescope's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2.
The rich browns and ocean-y blues of The Seahorse Nebula easily make it one of my favorite space bodies EVER. As you can probably tell by the fact that it's my blog banner.
Awesome space news of the week:
On Friday, November 4th, the Mars500 crew, a crew of 6 "marsonauts" completed their simulated mission to Mars that had them locked inside of a mock spaceship (in Russia) for 520 days. I'm psyched to further read about the results of the experiment.
Lastly, here's a really fun fact of life.
