A gaze across a cosmic skyscape, this telescopic mosaic reveals
the beauty of things that are. The evocative scene spans some 6
degrees or 12 Full Moons in planet Earth's sky. At the left,
folds of red, glowing gas are a small part of an immense, 300
light-year wide arc. Known as Barnard's loop, the structure is
too faint to be seen with the eye, shaped by long gone supernova
explosions and the winds from massive stars, and still traced by
the light of hydrogen atoms. Barnard's loop lies about 1,500
light-years away roughly centered on the Great Orion Nebula, a
stellar nursery along the edge of Orion's molecular clouds. But
beyond lie other fertile star fields in the plane of our Milky
Way Galaxy. At the right, the long-exposure composite finds NGC
2170, a dusty complex of nebulae near a neighboring molecular
cloud some 2,400 light-years distant.