N90.Name

Normally faint and elusive, the Jellyfish Nebula is caught in
this
alluring, false-color, telescopic view.

Flanked by two bright stars,
Mu
and
Eta
Geminorum,
at the foot of a
celestial
twin,
the Jellyfish Nebula is the brighter arcing
ridge of emission with dangling tentacles below and right of center.

In fact, the cosmic jellyfish is seen to be part of bubble-shaped
supernova remnant IC 443, the expanding
debris cloud from a
massive
star that exploded.

Light from the explosion first reached planet Earth over 30,000 years
ago.

Like its cousin in astrophysical waters the
Crab Nebula
supernova remnant, IC 443 is known to harbor
a neutron star, the remnant of the collapsed stellar core.

Emission nebula Sharpless 249 fills the field at the upper left.

The Jellyfish Nebula is about 5,000 light-years away.

At that distance, this image would be about 300 light-years
across.

The color scheme used in the narrowband composite was
made popular in Hubble Space Telescope images,
mapping emission
from oxygen, hydrogen, and sulfur atoms to blue,
green and red colors.

Suspended by
magnetic fields above a solar
active region
this dark filament stretches over 40
earth-diameters.

The ominous structure appears to be frozen in time
near
the Sun’s edge, but solar filaments are unstable and often erupt.

The detailed scene was captured on May 18 in
extreme ultraviolet
light by cameras on board the
Solar
Dynamics Observatory.

While the cooler plasma of the
filament
looks dark,
hotter, brighter plasma
below traces magnetic field lines emerging from the active region.

When seen arcing above the edge of the Sun,
filaments actually look bright against the dark background of space and
are called prominences

That’s no sunspot.

On the upper right of the above image of the Sun, the dark patches are actually the
International Space Station (ISS) and the
Space Shuttle Atlantis on mission
STS-132.

In the past, many
skygazers
have spotted the space station and space shuttles as bright
stars gliding through
twilight skies, still
glinting in the
sunlight while orbiting about 200 kilometers above the
Earth’s surface.

But here, astrophotographer
Thierry Lagault
accurately computed the occurrence of a rarer opportunity to
record
the spacefaring combination
moving quickly
in silhouette across the solar disk.

He snapped the
above picture on last Sunday on May 16,
about 50 minutes before the shuttle docked with the space station.

Atlantis was recently
launched to the ISS for its last mission before being retired.