October 28, 2016
Some stars end in silence, some in fire, and some leave behind the raw materials for birthdays.
Haunting the Cepheus Flare
Birthday · October 28, 2016
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APOD published October 28, 2016. Credit: Thomas Lelu. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
Spooky shapes seem to haunt this jeweled expanse, drifting through the night in the royal constellation Cepheus. Of course, the shapes are cosmic dust clouds faintly visible in dimly reflected starlight. Far from your own neighborhood on planet Earth, they lurk along the plane of the Milky Way at the edge of the Cepheus Flare molecular cloud complex some 1,200 light-years away. Over 2 light-years across and brighter than the other ghostly apparitions, vdB 141 or Sh2-136 is also known as the Ghost Nebula, seen at the right of the starry field of view. Within the nebula are the telltale signs of dense cores collapsing in the early stages of star formation.
Image credit: Thomas Lelu