“Wait a second! Isn’t this McCain’s silhouette in the last picture? What the…!”

Yeck! EEEEUUUGH!! Ewww.

Oh yegods I hope not!

If there’s one thing, I *don’t* want to see in the stars – or anywhere else – its that ugly old man. Its clear that you’re watching wa-aay too much political news.

But couldn’t you at least see Barack Obama in it given its a star birth region?

Eww .. bleck! You’re starting to give paradoila (or whateveuh) a bad name ..

“Wait a second! Isn’t this McCain’s silhouette in the last picture? What the…!”

Yeck! EEEEUUUGH!! Ewww.

Oh yegods I hope not!

If there’s one thing, I *don’t* want to see in the stars – or anywhere else – its that ugly old man. Its clear that you’re watching wa-aay too much political news.

But couldn’t you at least see Barack Obama in it given its a star birth region?

Eww .. bleck! You’re starting togoive paradoila (or whateveuh) a bad name ..

I love your work!

Its awesome, and marvellous and please keep it coming! :-D

Thankyou.

Question:
If I where to, say, fly by this ’space amoeba’ in my intergalactic cruiser would it appear to me as it is shown in this picture or has it been taken using other parts of the light spectrum (radiation, gamma, IR, etc) to make it look prettier? If so, how would it really look? Would it even be visible to the naked eye?

Although you might see it as a fuzzy cloud, it is unlikely for the fine detail we see in this image to be visible to the unaided eye. This is because the gas, while relatively dense, is still very, very rarefied. Some nebulae have a lower gas density than what would be considered a fairly hard vacuum in a lab on Earth. Hubble images almost all result from quite long exposures – this one was probably at least several minutes, if not over an hour.

Celestial objects such as this nebula are faint. Even through a medium-sized telescope, most nebulae appear to the human eye as no more than a little faint fuzzy patch.