Looking like something out of a Tim Burton movie, the eerie shapes seen here are part of a cloud of gas and dust located 1,470 light-years away in the constellation Cepheus. The transparent anthropomorphic figures with their outstretched “arms” are responsible for the structure’s spooky nickname: the “Ghost Nebula.”
Month: October 2017
We May Have Just Been Visited By An Interstellar Comet
“This object came from outside our solar system.” — Rob Weryk, postdoctoral researcher at University of Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy On October 14, 2017, what appears to be a comet (er, make that asteroid…read more below) sped past Earth at a distance of about 15 million miles after swinging around the Sun. It had come…
OSIRIS-REx Sees the Moon Like We Can’t
On September 22 NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft made a “slingshot” gravity-assist pass by Earth in order to adjust the angle of its flight toward Bennu. Mission scientists took the opportunity to test out the spacecraft’s cameras with planned observations of Earth and the Moon, and I’m happy to report that everything worked out perfectly! Some of…
Lights in the Dark 