I got sidetracked today on a planetarium show project and didn’t get a chance to blog until late tonight. I got to a stopping point (I’m doing a scratch narration so we can program the show on the dome before we bring in the pro narrator) and decided to resume shuffling through the goodies I brought home from AAS.

One of the announcements I picked up at the meeting in Seattle was about an astronomical image mosaic engine called “Montage.” It’s aimed at the professional and high-end amateur astronomer who wants to assemble FITS images into custom mosaics. If that’s your bag, take a gander at the program page. If not, then just feast your eyes on the gorgeous image of the Rho Oph region that someone used Montage to create.

The Rho Ophiuchi nebula is a cloud of dust and gas surrounding a hot, youngish star in the constellation Ophiuchus. The cloud itself has dust lanes interspersed with glowing gases lit by radiation from nearby stars. In some areas, young stars are forming deep within dust cocoons. Astronomers study this region to learn more about the early epochs of star formation, and they also survey its dust and gases to understand just what kinds of stars can form from these clouds. Rho Oph isn’t the only molecular cloud of its kind in our galaxy, but as you can see from the image above, it’s certainly among the loveliest to study.