The Extremophile's Lair

Here's a post inspired by Elizabeth of  Screw Bronze! .    Both her wonderful style of posts involving beautiful pictures and her desire to go up to Mauna Kea observatory in Hawaii.




 

Here's my favorite star cluster.  It's called the Wild Duck Cluster.  It's a bunch of newly formed stars heading out into the world.  Soon they'll break up into ones and twos and threes - but most stars have at least one other star with them throughout their lives.  We used to think that bianary stars were the exception!  Now we know they aren't.  And they can even have planets orbiting around both of them.

 
I can tell you from experience, going to an observatory can be harrowing and fun - sleep deprivation can do wierd things, but it's worth it.

 
But it's more fun if you go with people you like to be with!

 
Stars are born in nebulae (clouds of gas and dust) like this one.  They collapse out, until they're dense enough to burn on their own.  Sometimes stars blowing up close to them help the process out.

 
What I DON'T want to happen to Beth.  This is the remenant of a dead star.  Our sun's going to look like this someday.

 
But even when you do die, you'll leave this kind of thing behind - because you spread that much beauty around.  I really admire you for it.  But it shouldn't be soon. When stars are big enough they don't go gently into the good night.  When they run out of fuel and collapse, they do it so fast that atoms run into eachother with enoug force to make it explode outward. This is a Supernova remenant - a star that EXPLODED.

 
A Galaxy, plus some stars from ours. Rule of thumb: everything you can see it with your naked eye is in our galaxy.  Except on a really dark night, you can see a faint smudge which is our neighboring galaxy, the Andromeda Galaxy.

 
Eventually old blown-up star nebulas turn into collapsing back into new stars nebulas.  It's more complicated than that - they need to drift together into a bigger nebula. This only happens sometimes.