APOD: The Wide and Deep Lagoon (2016 Sep 09)

[APOD Robot]

The Wide and Deep Lagoon

Explanation: Ridges of glowing interstellar gas and dark dust clouds inhabit the turbulent, cosmic depths of the Lagoon Nebula. Also known as M8, the bright star forming region is about 5,000 light-years distant. But it still makes for a popular stop on telescopic tours of the constellation Sagittarius, toward the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. Dominated by the telltale red emission of ionized hydrogen atoms recombining with stripped electrons, this stunning, deep view of the Lagoon is nearly 100 light-years across. Right of center, the bright, compact, hourglass shape is gas ionized and sculpted by energetic radiation and extreme stellar winds from a massive young star. In fact, the many bright stars of open cluster NGC 6530 drift within the nebula, just formed in the Lagoon several million years ago.

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[Ann]

Great image! It really looks deep and three-dimensional. I think I can see that the outermost dark rim is in the foreground, the dark "lagoon" dust lane is at an intermediate distance, and the Hourglass Nebula and the neighbouring bright star (9 Sagittarius?) are located at the bottom of a deep starforming "well"!

Ann

[Boomer12k]

WOW....

:---[===] *

[Brit_in_Exile]

I just love these kind of pictures, which we nowadays almost take for granted with such throw-away lines as "100 light years across".

100 light years is of course absolutely enormous and it occurs to me that any beings inside of that are probably completely unaware of how beautiful their home looks from here, 5000 light years away...........unless our home looks similar from there ?!?

Anyone ever figured out how our home would look from their vantage point ?

[Chris Peterson]

I just love these kind of pictures, which we nowadays almost take for granted with such throw-away lines as "100 light years across".

100 light years is of course absolutely enormous and it occurs to me that any beings inside of that are probably completely unaware of how beautiful their home looks from here, 5000 light years away...........unless our home looks similar from there ?!?

Anyone ever figured out how our home would look from their vantage point ?

Like most of the galaxy. A region with stars. We're not in a nebula of significant density. BTW, if you lived in the Lagoon nebula you'd be unaware of that fact unless you had technology similar to our own. At most your sky background would be a bit brighter than our sky here, and there would be little or no visible structure.

[Asterhole]

Great image! It really looks deep and three-dimensional. I think I can see that the outermost dark rim is in the foreground, the dark "lagoon" dust lane is at an intermediate distance, and the Hourglass Nebula and the neighbouring bright star (9 Sagittarius?) are located at the bottom of a deep starforming "well"!

Ann

True, indeed. The "width" of this nebula - approximately 100 LY is only what we see form our vantage point. I well imagine it could be at least that much "deep".

[neufer]

[size=150]Solar neighbor (within 100 light years)[/size]

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Anyone ever figured out how our home would look from their vantage point ?

Like most of the galaxy. A region with stars.

There are no stars within 100 light years of the Sun brighter than -1 absolute magnitude. Hence none of our local stars (shown at left) would be visible to the naked human eye from 1,000 light years away much less 5,000 light years.

Inside of M8 the sky would be dominated by the bright stars in M8 as well as the surrounding M8 nebula (and its dark Bok globules). While just to this side of M8 our neighboring bright stars might appear in a telescope as a slight extension of the open star cluster M35.

[Chris Peterson]

[size=150]Solar neighbor (within 100 light years)[/size]

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Anyone ever figured out how our home would look from their vantage point ?

Like most of the galaxy. A region with stars.

There are no stars within 100 light years of the Sun brighter than -1 absolute magnitude. Hence none of our local stars (shown at left) would be visible to the naked human eye from 1,000 light years away much less 5,000 light years.

Sure. Like most of the galaxy. If someone looks in our direction they see a region of stars. Dim stars.

Inside of M8 the sky would be dominated by the bright stars in M8 as well as the surrounding M8 nebula (and its dark Bok globules). While just to this side of M8 our neighboring bright stars might appear in a telescope as a slight extension of the open star cluster M35.

To be clear, I wasn't suggesting the sky would look the same to an inhabitant of a planet in M8 as it does from here. Just that they wouldn't be very aware that they lived in a nebula. Bok globules would not be very apparent visually, nor would the brighter parts of the nebula. I imagine structure similar to what we see when we look at the Milky Way.

[Fred the Cat]

What a prince of an image! Those clouds look like they could produce purple rain from a mystic heaven. There has got to be a unicorn somewhere in there.

[neufer]

Those clouds look like they could produce purple rain from a mystic heaven.

There has got to be a unicorn somewhere in there.

• Monoceros (Greek for unicorn: Μονόκερως) is a faint constellation in almost the opposite direction.

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<<The Rosette Nebula (also known as Caldwell 49) is a large, spherical (circular in appearance), H II region located near one end of a giant molecular cloud in the Monoceros (Greek for unicorn: Μονόκερως) region of the Milky Way Galaxy.

The cluster and nebula lie at a distance of some 5,000 light-years from Earth) and measure roughly 50 light years in diameter. The mass of the nebula is estimated to be around 10,000 solar masses. Approximately 2500 young stars lie in this star-forming complex, including the massive O-type stars HD 46223 and HD 46150, which are primarily responsible for blowing the ionized bubble.

A diffuse X-ray glow is also seen between the stars in the bubble, which has been attribFsomevvuted to a super-hot plasma with temperatures ranging from 1 to 10 million K. This is significantly hotter than the 10,000 K plasmas seen in HII regions, and is likely attributed to the shock-heated winds from the massive O-type stars.>>

Quote Investigator
There Must Be a Pony Somewhere

<<Dear Quote Investigator: There is a famous joke about a child who wakes up on Christmas morning and is surprised to find a heap of horse manure under the tree instead of a collection of presents. Yet, the child is not discouraged because he has an extraordinarily optimistic outlook on life. His parents discover him enthusiastically shoveling the manure as he exclaims, “With all this manure, there must be a pony somewhere!”

New York Times language maven William Safire connected the tale to Ronald Reagan who enjoyed telling a version, but I know that the Broadway playwright James Kirkwood Jr. also wrote a semi-autobiographical 1960 novel referencing the tale with the title: There Must Be A Pony!

Would you please trace this comical anecdote?>>
------------------------------------------------
Quote Investigator:

<<There are many versions of this joke, and it has been evolving for more than one hundred years. The telltale sign of a pony seen by the expectant child has varied, e.g., horse dung, a horse shoe, horsehair, and a bale of hay. Sometimes one child was featured, and sometimes the divergent behaviors of an optimistic child and a pessimistic child were contrasted. This high variability makes the story difficult to trace. Also, the earliest instances located by QI used a different punchline.

In 1902 a state senator in Illinois addressed a banquet of business people in the advertising industry and presented the following narrative:

Three little children were hanging up their stockings. They were Rebecca and Rachel and Ikey. The old man had licked Ikey the night before and told him that Santa Claus was no good and wouldn’t bring him anything.

“Oh, yes,” said Ikey, “Santa Claus will; my father is an old friend of his; Santa Claus is a nice fellow; he will bring me something.”

By the way, I should tell you what a mean daddy the father was. He went out into the street and got a piece of frozen earth that hadn’t been left there by an automobile [laughter], and he put that—deliberately took and put it in poor little Ikey’s stocking. In the morning the three children were up early to find out what Santa Claus had left them. “What you got?” was the first question as each examined the contents of the stockings. Rachel had a little diamond ring and Rebecca had a gold watch. “And you, Ikey. What did you get?”

But Ikey was faithful.

“Well, Santa Claus is all right,” he said. “I think he brought me a pony, but he must have got away.”

In 1955 Wes Morgan, the 15-year-old cast member of the television program “The Life of Riley”, was profiled in a newspaper. A fellow actor told this short variant of the pony anecdote:

“Wes is the happiest kid I know. Show him a dark cloud and he’ll look forward to having fun in the rain. He reminds me of the story of the youngster who got himself clouted on the head by a horseshoe. When he came to, his first words were, ‘Well, there must be a pony around here to go with this shoe’!”

The counterculture figure Ken Kesey who authored the popular novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” also wrote the 1964 book “Sometimes a Great Notion” which included the following brief version of the gag:

The story is told that when Joe was a child his cousins emptied his Christmas stocking and replaced the gifts with horse manure. Joe took one look and bolted for the door, eyes glittering with excitement. “Wait, Joe, where you going? What did ol’ Santa bring you?” According to the story Joe paused at the door for a piece of rope. “Brought me a bran’-new pony but he got away. I’ll catch ’em if I hurry.”

In conclusion, this joke has a long history and many variations.>>

[Fred the Cat]

That turns my into a . I guess even purple clouds have silver linings.

[Boomer12k]

OK,
Second blob down from the top center.... The OSTRICH nebula....just left of center of image....

:---[===] *

[Ann]

Quote Investigator
There Must Be a Pony Somewhere

<<Dear Quote Investigator: There is a famous joke about a child who wakes up on Christmas morning and is surprised to find a heap of horse manure under the tree instead of a collection of presents. Yet, the child is not discouraged because he has an extraordinarily optimistic outlook on life. His parents discover him enthusiastically shoveling the manure as he exclaims, “With all this manure, there must be a pony somewhere!”

New York Times language maven William Safire connected the tale to Ronald Reagan who enjoyed telling a version, but I know that the Broadway playwright James Kirkwood Jr. also wrote a semi-autobiographical 1960 novel referencing the tale with the title: There Must Be A Pony!

So... In 1960 playwright James Kirkwood Jr. wrote a semi-autobiographical novel with the optimistic title, There must be a pony.

Six years later cosmically optimistic James T. Kirk(wood?) made his first appearance in Star Trek.

Coincidence? Well, hmm. Let's go where no man has gone before, on a pony. Whose name is, coincidentally, Enterprise.

(And now we know why frozen feces are sometimes said to fall from the sky.)

Ann

[Fred the Cat]

The astrophotographers here on APOD have wide and varied backgrounds and are stars in many fields.

Just watching a show about one of them.