NASA Image of the Day

This is the "Eskimo Nebula." You may ask, why do you post these pictures (in other words, you keep writing about naked Harry Potter but you have yet to post his picture here!)?

I post these pictures because it is a reminder that the universe is vast and beautiful and the things we blog about are infinitely small. I post them as a reminder that the race of homo sapiens is just now barely sticking our toes into the cosmic water.

And yet...I wonder. There's a wonderful line in Moby Dick where Ahab says (if memory serves), "Come, let me look into a human eye. Far better than to gaze upon God or sea or sky." There's something to that too.

Here's what NASA says about the "Eskimo Nebula:"

In 1787, astronomer William Herschel discovered the Eskimo Nebula, which from the ground resembles a person's head surrounded by a parka hood. In 2000, the Hubble Space Telescope imaged the nebula that displays gas clouds so complex they are not fully understood. The Eskimo Nebula is clearly a planetary nebula, and the gas seen above composed the outer layers of a sun-like star only 10,000 years ago. The inner filaments visible above are being ejected by strong wind of particles from the central star. The outer disk contains unusual light-year long orange filaments.

Image credit: NASA/Andrew Fruchter (STScI)