Cool: The Cosmic Christmas Ghost

[atommom]

Just like Charles Dickens' Christmas Carol takes us on a journey into past, present and future in the time of only one Christmas Eve, two of ESO's telescopes captured various stages in the life of a star in a single image.

ESO PR Photo 42a/05 shows the area surrounding the stellar cluster NGC 2467, located in the southern constellation of Puppis ("The Stern"). With an age of a few million years at most, it is a very active stellar nursery, where new stars are born continuously from large clouds of dust and gas.

The image, looking like a colourful cosmic ghost or a gigantic celestial Mandrill <1> , contains the open clusters Haffner 18 (centre) and Haffner 19 (middle right: it is located inside the smaller pink region - the lower eye of the Mandrill), as well as vast areas of ionised gas.

The bright star at the centre of the largest pink region on the bottom of the image is HD 64315, a massive young star that is helping shaping the structure of the whole nebular region.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-12/eso-tcc122305.php

[LunaSea]

1. pareidolia is a beautiful thing....

But how accurate are those colors?





edited because pareidolia is so damn hard to spell!

[sakabatou]

2. Don't know

But they usually fake the colors in photos of space, don't they? False colorization?

[rman]

3. Much of the stuff in space radiates on wavelengths not visible to

the unaided human eye (infra-red, ultra-violet and radio frequencies), and much of the radiation that is in the human visible spectrum is to faint to be visible to the human eye.

To make it visible, the picture has to be enhanced and/or translated to colors that are visible to the human eye.
So the colors are 'inaccurate' in the same way that night-vision images are 'inaccurate'; if the colors would be accurate, nothing would be visible in those images.