Clouds teem
with gas and dust in this close-up of the Orion Nebula.
Astronomers
combined observations taken by the Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for
Surveys (ACS) with those by ground-based observatories to build a comprehensive
view of the Orion Nebula.
This image
is just part of a 520-piece
mosaic of photographs obtained between 2004 and 2005 in five colors. The
larger mosaic covers a patch of sky about equivalent to that of the full Moon. The
pillars of dark dust reaching down from the top of this view are resisting
erosion from the intense ultraviolet light cast off by the nebula’s largest
stars, astronomers said.
-- SPACE.com Staff
Credit:
NASA, ESA, M. Robberto (Space Telescope Science Institute/ESA) and the Hubble
Space Telescope Orion Treasury Project Team
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