May 1, 2024
On your birthday, the Earth completed another orbit — 584 million miles traveled since your last celebration.
IC 1795: The Fishhead Nebula
Birthday · May 1, 2024
A little universe, just for you
Your date.
Ready to give.
Free PNG · 1080 × 1350 · No account needed
Image rights and credit requirements apply when sharing or reusing imagery.
Date & occasion only
Change the year
APOD published May 1, 2024. Credit: Roberto Colombari & Mauro Narduzzi. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
To some, this nebula looks like the head of a fish. However, this colorful cosmic portrait really features glowing gas and obscuring dust clouds in IC 1795, a star forming region in the northern constellation Cassiopeia. The nebula's colors were created by adopting the Hubble color palette for mapping narrowband emissions from oxygen, hydrogen, and sulfur atoms to blue, green and red colors, and further blending the data with images of the region recorded through broadband filters. Not far on the sky from the famous Double Star Cluster in Perseus, IC 1795 is itself located next to IC 1805, the Heart Nebula, as part of a complex of star forming regions that lie at the edge of a large molecular cloud. Located just over 6,000 light-years away, the larger star forming complex sprawls along the Perseus spiral arm of our Milky Way Galaxy. At that distance, IC 1795 would span about 70 light-years across. Open Science: Browse 3,300+ codes in the Astrophysics Source Code Library
Image credit: Roberto Colombari & Mauro Narduzzi