Starship Asterisk*

NGC 6914 Nebulae

Explanation: A dramatic study in contrasts, this colorful skyscape features stars, dust, and glowing gas in NGC 6914. The complex of nebulae lies some 6,000 light-years away, toward the high-flying northern constellation Cygnus and the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy. With foreground dust clouds in silhouette, both reddish hydrogen emission nebulae and dusty blue reflection nebulae fill the 1/2 degree wide field of view that spans nearly 50 light-years at the estimated distance of NGC 6914. Ultraviolet radiation from the massive, hot, young stars of the extensive Cygnus OB2 association ionize the region's atomic hydrogen gas, producing the characteristic red glow as protons and electrons recombine. Embedded Cygnus OB2 stars also provide the blue starlight strongly reflected by the dusty clouds. Constructed as a two-panel mosaic, the image was processed to bring out both bright and dim colors and detailed structures.

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Looks sort of like a blue jellyfish to me. I guess It's a boy.

Actually, now that I'm awake, it looks like a few Blue jellyfish floating along in a sea of red with sparkles, with their Tentacles partially lowered.

Love this website.

Anyway, the latest image (NGC 6914 Nebulae) looks slightly Fauvist, with a hint of Chagall.

Steve Parkes wrote:
Love this website.

Anyway, the latest image (NGC 6914 Nebulae) looks slightly Fauvist,
with a hint of Chagall.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fauvism wrote:
<<Fauvism is the style of les Fauves (French for "the wild beasts"), a short-lived and loose group of early twentieth-century Modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong colour over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism. While Fauvism as a style began around 1900 and continued beyond 1910, the movement as such lasted only a few years, 1904–1908, and had three exhibitions. The leaders of the movement were Henri Matisse and André Derain.

The paintings of the Fauves were characterised by seemingly wild brush work and strident colours, while their subject matter had a high degree of simplification and abstraction. Fauvism can be classified as an extreme development of Van Gogh's Post-Impressionism fused with the pointillism of Seurat and other Neo-Impressionist painters, in particular Paul Signac. Other key influences were Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin, whose employment of areas of saturated colour—notably in paintings from Tahiti—strongly influenced Derain's work at Collioure in 1905. In 1888 Gauguin had said to Paul Sérusier:

• “How do you see these trees? They are yellow. So, put in yellow; this shadow, rather blue, paint it with pure ultramarine; these red leaves? Put in vermilion.”

Wow! The detail! The color!

And not just blue and red... Love the various yellow nebulae!

Nice job!

-Noel

It really is a stunning picture.

This truly is a stunning image. A collaborative scientific team of mine has high resolution spectra of some of the Cyg OB2 stars, so I was curious to determine where the numbered stars of the Cyg OB2 association appear in this image. After much careful examination and comparison full size print version of the Palomar Sky Survey, a Yerkes Observatory-based professor emeritus of my scientific collaboration was able to conclude that the caption for this image reports incorrect information:

"Incorrect reporting on the part of today's APOD folks. Their image does NOT include the numbered Cyg OB2 stars of Morgan and Johnson, but rather a field about 1.5 deg to the northwest of the center of the finding chart in PASP, 66, 85 (1954).

The APOD image is oriented with east at the top and north to the right. The brighter of the two stars embedded in the reflection nebula near the upper center is BD +41 3737 = SAO 49589, with 2000 coordinates RA = 20:24:46.6 and DEC = 42:23:05."

and

"I have to add a little further information. In Simbad, BD +41 3737 is listed as a B3V star, which is Hubble's classic dividing line between (predominantly) emission and reflection nebulae. My guess is that the three (beautiful) blue reflection nebulae in the APOD image probably are normal reflection nebulae around mid-B to late-B stars. In the APOD image and on the POSS prints, the nebulae do look very localized, as would also be expected. A further guess therefore is that specifically the reflection nebulae have almost nothing to do with the Cyg OB2 association, despite the caption to the APOD."

I think they meant that the stars were energizing the gas in the region in general.

This chart view can help show where things are relative to one another. The red rectangle in the center is the field of view of the APOD.
-Noel

Ah, the Wasp Nebula. I like it.