Constellations.

Cosmic Fireworks

Like an incredible celestial firework display, dust, ionized material and molecular gas from a dying star form the Helix Nebula. The star is evolving to become a white dwarf star and appears as the tiny blue dot seen at the center. This picture, taken in infrared light by the ESO’s VISTA telescope at the Paranal Observatory, reveals strands of cold nebular gas that is invisible in images taken in visible light. The main ring of the Helix is about two light-years across, roughly half the distance between the Sun and the nearest star. Material from the nebula spreads out from the star to at least four light-years. The Helix Nebula lies in the constellation of Aquarius about 700 light years from Earth. (Credit: ESO)

Antennae galaxies, an intense star-forming region created when two galaxies began to collide some 200 million to 300 million years ago. The bright, blue-white areas show newly formed stars surrounded by clouds of hydrogen, which are colored pink. A similar collision is expected between our galaxy, the Milky Way, and the nearby Andromeda galaxy in several billion years.

Source: national geographic

Credit:NASA/ESA/HUBBLE

Spirit sends one of those pictures that looks like it could come from the red rock deserts of the American West, but actually shows part of the landscape in Gusev crater, a mere 60 million miles away. Credit: NASA

The dune field at the center of Victoria Crater, seen in a new false-color shot. Credit: NASA

Comet Lovejoy and The Pleiades

Starburst galaxy NGC 4449 in the M94 galaxy group 13 million light-years away (Hubble image)

have y’all seen that nasa pic of the earth with the sun behind it on the night time side it really really fucked me up my own soul became solid and like………….. weeped!

The Pinwheel Galaxy - this giant disk of stars, dust and gas is 170,000 light-years across; nearly twice the diameter of the Milky Way. It is estimated to contain at least one trillion stars, approximately 100 billion of which could be like our Sun in terms of temperature and lifetime [6000x4690]

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I realized why the idea of constellations has always swayed me. constellations are so very human.

our wonder of the stars is bone-sunk; we’ve been thinking and dreaming and watching and watching and watching since the beginning of time, and we looked for so long that we started making connections. 

we played a celestial game of connect-the-dots; trying to find order in something so vast and trying to show that the stars are in everything and everything is in the stars.

we plucked pictures out of the infinite; there’s a dog, there’s a bear, there’s a lion, see? look, right there; the stars hold and mirror back everything we see. 

but then it went a step further. instead of everyday things, we stopped picking out the cups and the bears, and instead we saw stories. 

look, Andromeda, chained to a rock and waiting to be devoured by Cetus. there’s Orion, and Hercules, and do you see Orpheus’ lyre? Zeus sent an eagle to retrieve it after Orpheus’ death and he placed it in the sky. 

we did the most human thing imaginable: we wrote our stories into the stars. we filled the night sky; previously so vast, so unknowable; with our history. we forged connections to the stars and made it so our children will always know where they come from. 

lesbians in space

Sunset from the International Space Station, taken by Scott Kelly

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