Winter Wonderspace

 Some of you may have heard of the Horsehead Nebula. Unlike some nicknames of astro objects this one is completely obvious as to the why part... And as always here you go with the distance - the light from this beauty takes 1,375 years to reach us. The light from the red nebula comes from the bright stars behind it ionizing the hydrogen gas. The star Malach is so bright it is casting quite a halo!

This beautiful blue canvas of planetary nebula should be familiar to alot of us. It is the Pleiades star cluster or sometimes called the Seven Sisters star cluster. You can see it with the naked eye but depending on the light pollution in your area you may be able to only see four or five of the stars. Six is usually the maximum number of stars. This bad girl is only 444 light years of distance between us.

This is Andromeda and I have displayed it in the past but I try to get a better shot every time. This one is also visible to the naked eye if your li8gh pollution isn't too bad. So this one is 152,000 light years wide but only 2.5 million lights distance from us :) It is considered a sister galaxy to our very own galaxy.  By the way can see two smudges in the picture - those two sister galaxies to Andromeda.

Recognize this nighttime dominator. And for distance it is on average 1.2 Light Seconds away!

This NGC 2238 but also very appropriately nicknamed the Rosette Nebula and it is 130 light years in diameter but 5,000 light years away.

This old standby the Orion Nebula M42 I have taken so many times but again I try to do better every time. 1,344 light years distance and 24 light years in diameter.