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Credit & Copyright: Bogdan Jarzyna
Explanation:
Do any shapes seem to jump out at you from this interstellar field of stars and dust?
The jeweled expanse, filled with faint, starlight-reflecting
clouds, drifts through the night in the royal constellation of
Cepheus.
Far from your own neighborhood on planet
Earth,
these ghostly apparitions lurk along the
plane of the Milky Way at the
edge of the Cepheus Flare
molecular cloud complex some 1,200 light-years away.
Over two light-years across and brighter than the other spooky chimeras,
VdB 141 or Sh2-136 is also known as the
Ghost
Nebula, seen at toward the bottom of the
featured image.
Within the reflection nebula are the telltale signs of dense cores
collapsing
in the early
stages of star formation.
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NASA Web Site Statements, Warnings, and Disclaimers
NASA Official: Jay Norris. Specific rights apply.
A service of: LHEA at NASA / GSFC
& Michigan Tech. U.
Based on Astronomy Picture
Of the Day
Publications with keywords: reflection nebula
Publications with words: reflection nebula
See also:
- APOD: 2026 April 7 Á IC 4592: The Blue Horsehead Reflection Nebula
- APOD: 2026 February 2 Á Orion: The Running Man Nebula
- NGC 1333: Stellar Nursery in Perseus
- APOD: 2026 January 28 Á M78: Reflecting Blue in a Sea of Red
- NGC 7023: The Iris Nebula
- APOD: 2025 September 19 Á The NGC 6914 Complex
- Reflections on VdB 31