U Camelopardalis (aka U Cam) is a star nearing the end of its life. When stars run low on fuel for their normal fusion reactions, they become unstable. Every few thousand years, U Cam coughs out an almost spherical shell of gas as helium from its core begins to fuse. The gas ejected in the star’s latest eruption can be seen in this picture as a faint bubble around the star.
U Cam is an example of a carbon star. That’s a rare type of star with an atmosphere that contains more carbon than oxygen. Because of relatively low surface gravity, as much as half of the total mass of a carbon star may we swept away by powerful stellar winds. U Cam is located in the constellation of Camelopardalis (The Giraffe) which is near the North Celestial Pole, U Cam is much smaller than it appears in this image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The star would easily fit within a single pixel in the image. However, it is bright enough to saturate the camera’s photosensors which causes the star look much larger.
The shell of gas, both much larger and much fainter than its parent star, is visible in the picture. Gas clouds from expolsions are often quite irregular and unstable, but the shell of gas ejected from U Cam is almost perfectly spherical.
Image Credit: NASA
The Gentle Reader may remember that Protect Our Elections/EMPR Inc. is The 
In this image from ESO’s Very Large Telescope, light from blue stars irradiates the gas left over from those stars’ recent formation in the emission nebula, LHA 120-N55. The abundant hydrogen atom glow red.
BTW, I learned to type on an all-caps machine, a Teletype Model 15.
This worth posting simply because it’s pretty.
Hmmm, things are beginning to proceed a bit faster than i had foreseen. I had expected Maryland to wait another week before loosening up.
We have a couple of particularly nice trees in the front yard here at Stately Hoge Manor, and I’ve posted pictures of them from time to time. The ornamental cherry tree is spectacular when it is blossoming. The Carroll County Times has put pictures of it on the front page twice since we’ve lived here.
NGC 4565 is sometimes called the Needle Galaxy. It’s an edge-on spiral galaxy located about 30 million light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices (Berenice’s Hair). Its bright yellowish central bulge juts out above impressive dust lanes.
Protect Our Elections is a sort of subsidiary to Velvet Revolution.US which is allegedly concerned with election integrity. I has lots of stuff about real and imagined activities by Russians and Republicans, but nothing about Democrat shenanigans.
MUSIC: Theme. Intro and fade under.