Hubble is back, thus saving me from thinking about anything political!This is the Butterfly Nebula. I see Dave Bowman from Arthur C. Clarke's (and Stanley Kubrick's) 2001: A Space Odyssey! Do you see him? It's like the "star child" is looking at himself in a hubble mirror! officially ...
"The Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), a new camera aboard the Hubble Space Telescope, snapped this image of the planetary nebula, catalogued as NGC 6302, but more popularly called the Butterfly Nebula. NGC 6302 lies within the Milky Way, roughly 3,800 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius. The glowing gas is the star’s outer layers, expelled over about 2,200 years. The “butterfly” stretches for more than 2 light-years, which is about half the distance from the Sun to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri."
... hmmm, not a word about Dave Bowman, The Monolith or the Hal-9000 (who "always enjoyed working with people" even though he occasionally cut off their life support systems or set them adrift in space, thus earning the nickname "Death Panel Hal") ... what, are there no science-fiction fans at NASA?
{check out this NASA link for some phenomenal Hubble images} ...
... meanwhile, if you want to know what I've been up to, see post below ...
2 comments:
Beautiful!!!
You're not really that far away from the VLA. Ever go down there and see the photographs in the visitor center?
This one is very cool, indeed!
Peace.
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