Sky nettle


A wide starfield fills the frame, with a bright, textured orange cloud of glowing gas in the lower right that resembles a jellyfish. Its center is dense and fibrous and its lower edge frayed into wisps. Fainter strands of orange gas arc upward from it into a larger, hazy cloud that stretches across the top half of the image, fading from murky yellow-green on the upper left into soft blue on the upper right and cut through by dark, jagged dust lanes. Small white stars are scattered over the black background, with a couple of brighter yellow-white stars standing out near the left edge and below the main jellyfish-shaped cloud.

Carl Parnell, taken from Dawlish, Devon, UK

The Jellyfish Nebula (IC 443 or Sharpless 2–248) is the remnant of a supernova that went off some 30,000 years ago in Gemini. Filling the top half of the image is a glowing molecular complex threaded by multiple dark nebula (LDN 1565–8). The supernova debris plowing into this cloud is what generates the glowing shock wave that forms the top of the “head” of the jellyfish. The bright star just to the right of the jellyfish’s tentacles is Propus; the bright star in the upper left is Tejat. The imager took 7 hours of exposure with a 2-inch scope in the Hubble palette.