Colorful planetary nebula captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.
This is a public domain photo from the GRIN Great Images In NASA Collection within the NASA image archive.
This fantastic public domain photo from the Hubble Space Telescope captures a planetary nebula with great color. Planetary nebulae are a dense mist of gas expelled by a star. In some situations, these gases provide the medium from which planets are developed. This particular nebula image has the look of an eye, or an old fashioned marble. It would work great in a background texture collage or on its own as a wallpaper.
This image was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope – NASA. NASA is an Agency of the United States Government, therefore this image is in the public domain.
1 megabyte JPG. Hosted by nasa.gov.
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03.15.10
The first thought that comes to mind when you see this image is that it is a picture of the iris of the eye, maybe photoshopped a little bit. However, this is no 1.5 centimeter object. Indeed, what if I were to tell you that it is nothing less thousands and thousands of meters in diameter alone? Perhaps you would laugh if I said that this brilliant burst of colour was millions of miles away, up in the sky. However, this is, in effect, reality. The image is an image of a nebula.
Prior to the invention of the telescope, astronomers called any diffuse looking celestial object a ‘nebula.’ Today, however, with the advent of telescopes and super-telescopes, this definition has been broadened to ‘a cloud of interstellar gas, dust and plasma created by both the formation and destruction of stars’
The nebula in the image is a planetary nebula, depicted by a bright burst of color with an expanding glowing shell. The core is dark, hot and burning. An artist could describe its hues as warm, an intricate gel of warm pink and orange admixed with a cooler pale blue. Fragments of stars peep out from its interiors, gleaming like embers.
If first impressions are to be considered, one might say that this was the eye of God peeping out at us, reminding us that He is ever watching. Indeed, the sky is truly nature’s infinite tapestry and nebulae are surely its finest works of art.
03.20.10
BURST OF BRILLIANT CRACKERS:
The image is like that bursting of crackers in the sky which will go to great meters in the sky is burst and viewed all over the space. Actually I am wondering the same type of thing that is also happening in the sky too.The planetary nebula play an important role in the evolution, because most of the stars will evolve through this phase. They are multi-wave length laboratories for our understanding of atomic , molecular, dust and plasma process in diverse astrophysical environments. The wonderfully diverse morphologies of planetary nebula are obtained hydrodynamical shaping mechanisms and the role of magnetic field and rotation. Their influence on the interstellar media of galaxies, including chemical enrichment and their ever growing use of their narrow high luminosity emission lines to probe the dynamics and mass distribution of galaxies and the intergalactic media of clusters of galaxies.Now we have supersonic telescopes to view the planetary nebula and it also called the cat’s eye nebula. The burst looks like the cat’s eye. Mostly brown and blue colours, and the minute lines shows like the nerves in the eyes. The centre of the nebula is bright and shining glow like a new light is emerging out of it. It is also like a modern art in a gallery.