#spacemas

SPACEMAS DAY 17 ✨🪐🌎☄️☀️🌕

The Ring Nebula (M57), is more complicated than it appears through a small telescope. The easily visible central ring is about one light-year across, but this remarkable exposure by the James Webb Space Telescope explores this popular nebula with an exposure in infrared light. Strings of gas, like eyelashes around a cosmic eye, become evident around the nebula in this digitally enhanced featured image in assigned colors. These long filaments may be caused by the shadowing of knots of dense gas in the ring from energetic light emitted within. The Ring Nebula is an elongated planetary nebula, a type of gas cloud created when a Sun-like star evolves to throw off its outer atmosphere to become a white dwarf star. The central oval in the Ring Nebula lies about 2,500 light-years away toward the musical constellation Lyra.

Hey everyone! Happy Spacemas! Whatever it is you celebrate around this time of year, I hope it's going okay and that you're healthy.

Thank you for another wonderful year of support here on Tapas. It's wild to me that Space School has like, basically gotten a second life since I started posted it on Tapas? It's an old comic, with so many years behind it, and like, it's not perfect-- but I still like it, I still have fun with it, so it's just... really sweet to me that other folks can enjoy it too. ;v; We can enjoy my humble little underdog together!

I'm going to skip an update or two here to help give myself a buffer during the holidays, but we'll be back to once a week updates in January!

SPACEMAS DAY 1 ✨🪐🌎☄️☀️🌕

What a better way to start than with one of the faves!!

Fittingly named the Horsehead Nebula, it is around 1,500 light-years away, embedded in the vast Orion cloud complex and is sculpted by stellar winds and radiation. About 5 light-years "tall," the dark interstellar cloud, is cataloged as Barnard 33, is a star forming region. It is visible only because its dust is silhouetted against the glowing red emission nebula IC 434. To the lower left of the image there is a contrasting blue reflection nebula NGC 2023, surrounding a hot, young star. The featured gorgeous color image combines both narrowband and broadband images recorded using several different telescopes.

SPACEMAS DAY 25 ✨🪐🌎☄️☀️🌕

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!! These last 25 days have been so fun! Thank you for coming along with me!!

Majestic on a cosmic scale, M100 is known as a grand design spiral galaxy. It’s a large galaxy of over 100 billion stars with well-defined spiral arms that is similar to the Milky Way Galaxy. Also one of the brightest members of the Virgo Cluster of galaxies, M100 (aka NGC 4321) is 56 million light-years away toward the constellation of Berenice's Hair (Coma Berenices). This Hubble Space Telescope image of M100 was taken with the Wide Field Camera 3 and accentuates bright blue star clusters and intricate winding dust lanes which are hallmarks of this class of galaxies. Studies of variable stars in M100 have played an important role in determining the size and age of the Universe.

SPACEMAS DAY 14 ✨🪐🌎☄️☀️🌕

Most galaxies don't have any rings of stars and gas but why does M94 have two? First, spiral galaxy M94 has an inner ring of newly formed stars surrounding its nucleus, giving it not only an unusual appearance but also a strong interior glow. A leading hypothesis states that there’s an elongated knot of stars known as a bar, and it rotates in M94. This has generated a burst of star formation in this inner ring. Observations have also revealed another ring, an outer ring. This one is more faint, different in color, not closed, and relatively complex. What caused this outer ring to form is currently unknown. M94, pictured here, spans about 45,000 light years in total, lies about 15 million light years away, and can be seen with a small telescope toward the constellation of the Hunting Dogs (Canes Venatici).

SPACEMAS DAY 24 ✨🪐🌎☄️☀️🌕

Merry Christmas Eve everyone 🎄🎅🏻☃️❄️🥰

Formed within the nebula cataloged as NGC 281, are the stars of open cluster IC 1590. The cluster's young, massive stars ultimately power the pervasive nebular glow. The eye-catching shapes looming in the featured portrait of NGC 281 are sculpted dusty columns and dense globules seen in silhouette, eroded by intense, energetic winds and radiation from the hot cluster stars. If they survive long enough, the dusty structures could also be sites of future star formation. Called the Pacman Nebula because of its overall shape, NGC 281 is about 10,000 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia. This sharp composite image was made through narrow-band filters. It combines emission from the nebula's hydrogen and oxygen atoms to synthesize red, green, and blue colors. The scene spans well over 80 light-years.