supernova remnant
esiegel | October 22, 2012"This nebula had such a resemblance to a comet in its form and brightness that I endeavored to find others, so that astronomers would not confuse these same nebulae with comets just beginning to shine." -Charles Messier
Let's take a journey back in time to when our known Universe was a lot smaller. The only planets discovered were Mercury through Saturn: the naked eye planets. The well-known objects were our Moon, the (naked-eye) planets and their moons, and the stars and the Sun. After those, the only new objects that were routinely hunted in the night sky were those two-tailed recurring…
esiegel | September 26, 2012"And now here is my secret, a very simple secret; it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye." -Antoine de Saint-Exupery
The great nebular structures stretching across our galaxy are evidence of the birth and deaths of stars, or so I -- an astrophysicist -- have been telling you. But an apparently void region of our sky was discovered to house a nebula so remarkable, that I never would have imagined it could exist in the heavens.
Image credit: a 10-degree field-of-view on the sky, created with Stellarium.
Just a degree or two away from the…