A new view on the Horsehead Nebula

Ever seen the Horsehead Nebula? If you look at the easternmost star in Orion's Belt through a telescope, you're likely to see something like this (the star is just off the image to your left):

A pretty little nebula, to be sure, but it doesn't look all that spectacular. I mean really, there's a fancy emission nebula behind some dust, that happens to look like a horse's head. It's mostly cloud-watching in space.

But then I saw a picture where Star Shadows Remote Observatory decided to over-expose the horsehead nebula and the area around it. Now, overexposing a region of sky is how you see fainter and fainter objects; that's how they got the Hubble Deep Field, for instance. Without further ado, here's what you see when you both overexpose the horsehead nebula and zoom way out:

Well, all I have to say is that I have both a new respect for the emission nebula IC 434 and for that dust that makes the horsehead so damn absorptive! Hope you like these pictures as much as I do, and feel free to look at the images separately; they're both higher resolution then I'm able to illustrate on this page!

More like this

"If you are fearful, a horse will back off. If you are calm and confident, it will come forward. For those who are often flattered or feared, the horse can be a welcome mirror of the best in human nature." -Clare Balding
"My role in society, or any artist's or poet's role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all." -John Lennon
"What do we mean by setting a man free? You cannot free a man who dwells in a desert and is an unfeeling brute. There is no liberty except the liberty of some one making his way towards something.
"Change, like sunshine, can be a friend or a foe, a blessing or a curse, a dawn or a dusk." -William Arthur Ward

Can I use the above picture on my blog site, or anywhere else?

By MsBridgit (not verified) on 24 Sep 2013 #permalink