Friday, December 5, 2014

APOD 2.5

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This pillar of dust makes what looks like to be a 20 light year long seahorse. The dust structure art is provided to courtesy of our neighboring Large Magellanic Cloud. The Large Magellanic Cloud is inside a star forming region near the Tarantula Nebula. The nebula is in the midst of forming a star cluster is referred to as NGC 2074. The center is visible in this image if you look towards the top around where the neck of the seahorse is. This image was taken back in 2008 by the Hubble Space Telescope using its Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 to celebrate Hubble's 100,000th trip around Earth. As these stars form in the cluster, their light and wind will erode the dust structure away over the next million years or so.

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