October 24, 2022
Somewhere in the sky tonight, a star is being born in a cloud of gas and dust, beginning a journey that will last billions of years.
Clouds Around Galaxy Andromeda
Birthday · October 24, 2022
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APOD published October 24, 2022. Credit: Andrew Fryhover. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
What are those red clouds surrounding the Andromeda galaxy? This galaxy, M31, is often imaged by planet Earth-based astronomers. As the nearest large spiral galaxy, it is a familiar sight with dark dust lanes, bright yellowish core, and spiral arms traced by clouds of bright blue stars. A mosaic of well-exposed broad and narrow-band image data, this deep portrait of our neighboring island universe offers strikingly unfamiliar features though, faint reddish clouds of glowing ionized hydrogen gas in the same wide field of view. Most of the ionized hydrogen clouds surely lie in the foreground of the scene, well within our Milky Way Galaxy. They are likely associated with the pervasive, dusty interstellar cirrus clouds scattered hundreds of light-years above our own galactic plane. Some of the clouds, however, occur right in the Andromeda galaxy itself, and some in M110, the small galaxy just below.
Image credit: Andrew Fryhover