In All the Old Familiar Places

Like the Veil Nebula.  A pair of highly cool amateur astronomers named Paul Mortfield, of Backyard Astronomer fame, and Stefan Cancelli of Astro Garage made this image from observations of the Veil Nebula. It was featured on Astronomy Picture of the Day on November 1.

I don’t know about you, but I see a huge flying owl in the expanding cloud of dust and debris that marks the spot where a supernova exploded somewhere between five and eight thousand years ago.

They took their image from their observatories in the Sierra Nevadas of California, using specialty filters and no doubt some image processing to sharpen the view. Red indicates hydrogen gas, blue is oxygen and green is a combination of the two. The whole thing makes for an incredibly beautiful image.

I encourage you to check out these guys and their work at the links above. Amateurs are (as I have always felt) making incredibly good contributions to our appreciation and study of the universe.