September 24, 2006
A birthday is what happens when cosmic time briefly puts down the scale of eons and pays attention to a single human year.
NGC 1499: The California Nebula
Birthday · September 24, 2006
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APOD published September 24, 2006. Full image credits are on the original APOD entry below. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
What's California doing in space? Drifting through the Orion Arm of the spiral Milky Way Galaxy, this cosmic cloud by chance echoes the outline of California on the west coast of the United States. Our own Sun also lies within the Milky Way's Orion Arm, only about 1,500 light-years from the California Nebula. Also known as NGC 1499, the classic emission nebula is around 100 light-years long. It glows with the red light characteristic of hydrogen atoms recombining with long lost electrons, stripped away (ionized) by energetic starlight. In this case, the star most likely providing the energetic starlight is the bright, hot, bluish Xi Persei, just right of the nebula and above picture center. Fittingly, this composite picture was made with images from a telescope in California - the 48-inch (1.2-meter) Samuel Oschin Telescope - taken as a part of the second National Geographic Palomar Observatory Sky Survey.