Photo # 1 (May 2009)

SEAHORSE IN THE LARGE MAGELLANIC CLOUD

Last night as I lay in bed looking at the stars I thought 'Where the hell is the ceiling ?'
When you reach for the stars, you may not quite get one, but you won't come up with a handful of mud either.
                              - Leo Burnett.

Credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Livio (STScI)

Looking like a grazing seahorse, the dark object toward the image right is actually a pillar of smoky dust about 20 light years long. The curiously-shaped dust structure occurs in our neighboring Large Magellanic Cloud, in a star forming region very near the expansive Tarantula Nebula. The energetic nebula is creating a star cluster, NGC 2074, whose center is visible just off the top of the image in the direction of the neck of the seahorse. The representative color image was taken last year by the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 in honor of Hubble's 100,000th trip around the Earth. As young stars in the cluster form, their light and winds will slowly erode the dust pillars away over the next million years.

Our imagination is unlimited, exceeding the countless stars in the universe. Both are cradles for creativity, and lovely when they meet and interact.
                              - Dan Benor