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Drifting through the Orion Arm of the spiral Milky Way Galaxy, this cosmic cloud by chance echoes the outline of California on the west coast of the United States. Our own Sun also lies within the Milky Way's Orion Arm, only about 1,500 light-years from the California Nebula. Also known as NGC 1499, the classic emission nebula is around 100 light-years long. It glows with the red light characteristic of hydrogen atoms recombining with long lost electrons, stripped away (ionized) by energetic starlight. In this case, the star most likely providing the energetic starlight is the bright, hot, bluish Xi Persei, just near the nebula and at right of picture center. (Text adapted from Astronomy Picture of the Day)
This image is a composite from black and white images taken with the Palomar Observatory's 48-inch (1.2-meter) Samuel Oschin Telescope as a part of the second National Geographic Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS II). The images were recorded on two type of glass photographic plates - one sensitive to red light and the other to blue and later they were digitized. Credit: Caltech, Palomar Observatory, Digitized Sky Survey. In order to produce the color image seen
here, I worked with a total of 50 different frames,
25 for each color band, coming from
2 different plates taken between 1988 and 1993.
Original file is 14,785x16,938
pixels with a resolution of about 1 arcsec per pixel. The image show an area
of sky large 4.1° x 4.7° (for
comparison, the full-Moon is about 0.5° in diameter). Other images of the same celestial field found online
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