#interstellar dust

[quiltofstars]

The Blue Horsehead Nebula, IC 4592 // Michael Smithers

[livingforstars]

The Milky Way Through the Summer Triangle - December 12th, 1996.

"There are more than a few stars in our galaxy. The light from many of them combines to appear as a wisp of faint light across the night sky - the Milky Way. In the northern hemisphere, away from city lights and during the summer months, part of the Milky Way can be seen behind the Summer Triangle of stars - Deneb, Vega, and Altair. These are the brightest three stars in the above photograph, listed from left to right, respectively. If you could collect light in your eyes for 10 minutes at a time (instead of the usual 1/10th of a second), you might see something like the above photograph. Behind the Summer Triangle lies some of the vast star fields of our Milky Way galaxy, containing literally billions of stars. The dark band across the middle that seems to divide the stars is actually interstellar dust, which absorbs more visible light than it emits and so appears dark."

[thefirststarr]

SPACEMAS DAY 5 ✨🪐🌎☄️☀️🌕

Time to pull out one of my favourites! These stunning cosmic clouds have blossomed 1,300 light-years away in the fertile starfields of the constellation Cepheus. Known as the Iris Nebula, NGC 7023 is not the only nebula to evoke the imagery of flowers. Still, this deep telescopic image shows off the nebula’s range of colors and symmetries embedded in surrounding fields of interstellar dust. Within the Iris itself, dusty nebular material surrounds a hot, young star. The dominant color of the brighter reflection nebula is blue, characteristic of dust grains reflecting starlight. The central filaments of the reflection nebula glow with a faint reddish photoluminescence as some dust grains effectively convert the star's invisible ultraviolet radiation to visible red light.

Image Credit: Lorand Fenyes

[cat-eye-nebula]

Photo by cat-eye-nebula.tumblr.com

[thorsenmark]

Milky Way Stretching Across the Night Skies at Petrified Forest National Park by Mark Stevens Via Flickr: A last image captured while standing one evening outside the main north entrance to Petrified Forest National Park. This was with a Nikkor 20mm f/1.8G that I bought just for these starry night conditions and capturing images. I did some initial processing of the RAW/NEF image in ViewNXi Edited, export that to Viveza 2 and finished any image edits in DxO PhotoLab 4.

[apocalypse-polakiewicz]

royalbrandon

[wigmund]

From Astronomy Picture of the Day; January 8, 2018:

Clouds of Andromeda Daniel López / IAC

What are those red clouds surrounding the Andromeda galaxy? This galaxy, M31, is often imaged by planet Earth-based astronomers. As the nearest large spiral galaxy, it is a familiar sight with dark dust lanes, bright yellowish core, and spiral arms traced by clouds of bright blue stars. A mosaic of well-exposed broad and narrow-band image data, this colorful portrait of our neighboring island universe offers strikingly unfamiliar features though, faint reddish clouds of glowing ionized hydrogen gas in the same wide field of view. These ionized hydrogen clouds surely lie in the foreground of the scene, well within our Milky Way Galaxy. They are likely associated with the pervasive, dusty interstellar cirrus clouds scattered hundreds of light-years above our own galactic plane.

[quiltofstars]

The Cosmic Bat Nebula, LDN 43 // Andreas & Dark Matters Astrophotography

Happy Halloween everyone! 🎃