by Ann » Thu Mar 06, 2014 3:27 pm
This is a lovely picture, very detailed. Unlike yesterday's APOD, this is a more or less true color image, meaning that the colors that you can see in it are reasonably close to what our human eyes would see, if our eyes were many times more sensitive than they are to incredibly faint colors.
Sky Catalogue 2000.0 Volume 2 describes NGC 1333 as a bright nebula whose color is "B" for "Blue". Unlike the various nebulosities surrounding the sisters of the Pleiades, the reflection nebula of NGC 1333 isn't "VB" for "Very Blue".
NGC 1333 looks like a small, low-mass site of star formation. There appear to be exactly two stars in it that are massive and hot enough to be blue, namely HIP 16243, which sits immediately to the left of the massive dust feature, and an unnamed and unclassified star ( at least unknown and unclassified by my software), which is creating all the conspicuous blue reflection nebulosity.
The dust feature contains a lot of little yellowish and reddish nebulas as well as little orange-red dots of light. All these little light are likely produced by low-mass stars, some of which throw their tiny little tantrums and create their diminutive little Ha nebulas.
I can't help quoting Shakespeare here:
All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances;
Here the newborn stellar runts are the little players, making their entrances along with their own tiny little mayhems, until after trillions of years they will make their exits, possibly with a whimper. It could well be that all this play in several excruciatingly long acts will not signify much, and perhaps it will signify nothing.
Maybe. But for now, the stage, as it is laid out for us in this APOD, is really very, very beautiful.
Ann
This is a lovely picture, very detailed. Unlike yesterday's APOD, this is a more or less true color image, meaning that the colors that you can see in it are reasonably close to what our human eyes would see, if our eyes were many times more sensitive than they are to incredibly faint colors.
Sky Catalogue 2000.0 Volume 2 describes NGC 1333 as a bright nebula whose color is "B" for "Blue". Unlike the various nebulosities surrounding the sisters of the Pleiades, the reflection nebula of NGC 1333 isn't "VB" for "Very Blue".
NGC 1333 looks like a small, low-mass site of star formation. There appear to be exactly two stars in it that are massive and hot enough to be blue, namely HIP 16243, which sits immediately to the left of the massive dust feature, and an unnamed and unclassified star ( at least unknown and unclassified by my software), which is creating all the conspicuous blue reflection nebulosity.
The dust feature contains a lot of little yellowish and reddish nebulas as well as little orange-red dots of light. All these little light are likely produced by low-mass stars, some of which throw their tiny little tantrums and create their diminutive little Ha nebulas.
I can't help quoting Shakespeare here:
[quote]All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; [/quote]
Here the newborn stellar runts are the little players, making their entrances along with their own tiny little mayhems, until after trillions of years they will make their exits, possibly with a whimper. It could well be that all this play in several excruciatingly long acts will not signify much, and perhaps it will signify nothing.
Maybe. But for now, the stage, as it is laid out for us in this APOD, is really very, very beautiful.
Ann