An ionized rose would smell as sweet

I’m such a sucker for emission nebulae, the sites of intense star formation. Part of that is because I spent years researching other types of gaseous clouds, but also because they’re just so darn pretty, like this shot of NGC 371:

[Click to ennebulanate, or get the 2000 x 2000 pixel version).]

NGC 371 is in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a companion galaxy to our Milky Way. That puts it at a distance of about 200,000 light years, or 2 quintillion (2,000,000,000,000,000,000) kilometers.
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