Daily Telescope: Meet the Flying Bat and Squid nebulae

Enlarge / The Flying Bat and Squid nebulae. (credit: Ryan Génier)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light—a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’ll take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It is October 27, and today’s image takes us 2,000 light-years from Earth. That is very far, but still in our little corner of the Milky Way Galaxy, which stretches about 105,000 light-years from end to end.

In this photo, courtesy of Ryan Génier, the large reddish object that covers much of the canvas is the Flying Bat Nebula. It is, essentially, a huge cloud of hydrogen gas. The Squid Nebula is shown in blue, indicating doubly ionized oxygen—which is when you ionize your oxygen once and then ionize it again just to make sure. (In all seriousness, it likely indicates a low-mass star nearing the end of its life).