Galactic Trance! Stare Into The Eyes of NGC 2467, Feel The Nausea.
(Click image to enlarge)
Stare deeply into the eyes of NGC 2467. Stare into them and feel the universal glory, the nausea of existing in such a realm! It beckons you to understand. But you cannot. I cannot. We are mud-men-ape-brains.
io9:
[Let’s] hear from European Southern Observatory, although even they can’t avoid discussing the face in the nebula:
With an age of a few million years at most, it is a very active stellar nursery, where new stars are born continuously from large clouds of dust and gas. The image, looking like a colourful cosmic ghost or a gigantic celestial Mandrill, contains the open clusters Haffner 18 (centre) and Haffner 19 (middle right: it is located inside the smaller pink region – the lower eye of the Mandrill), as well as vast areas of ionised gas. The bright star at the centre of the largest pink region on the bottom of the image is HD 64315, a massive young star that is helping shaping the structure of the whole nebular region.
Through the caffeine vapors and the jitters of Truth, I’ll divine what it’s trying to tell us! Right?