Dear RS, this picture is inspired by your comment (we LUV Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy :) and as I've recently caught this 'cosmic craving' from my colleague Fedor I've decided to place this a-ma-zing picture of Helix Nebula (aka the Eye of God as it is metaphorically called by the poets of our society :). Actually, it's a succesion - or, rather, a composite - of images taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.
The astronomers are being very close to us lighting freaks watching this "trillion-mile-long tunnel of glowing gases" - we are humans, after all, and a human brain just cannot embrace the cosmic dimensions... at least my big brain can't :)
At its center is dying star which has ejected masses of dust and gas to form tentacle-like filaments stretching toward an outer rim composed of the same material. They say, our sun may look like this in several billion years.
I like the feeling of the words as they're slipping off my tongue... the Kohoutek 4-55 planetary nebula in the constellation Cygnus... A miraculous visual effect - but not to our bare eyes!
Photo - Courtesy: NASA, WIYN, NOAO, ESA, Hubble Helix Nebula Team, M. Meixner (STScI), & T. A. Rector (NRAO)
... at first a lightning blog feels a bit narrow and specialized.
ReplyDeleteNow I know better.
Enlightened!
... its about life itself :)
Roine