That’s the star Hen 2-427 (aka WR 124) at the center of this picture. It’s surrounded by the nebula M1-67. They’re found in the constellation of Sagittarius about 15,000 light-years away. The star shines brightly at the very center of these hot clumps of surrounding gas that it’s ejecting into space at over 150,000 km per hour.
Hen 2-427 is a Wolf–Rayet star. Named after the astronomers Charles Wolf and Georges Rayet, Wolf–Rayet stars are super-hot and characterized by a fierce ejection of mass. In this case, that results in the nebula M1-67 which is estimated to be less than 10,000 years old, a newbie in astronomical terms,
Image Credit: ESA
NGC 2022 is a planetary nebula in the constellation Orion. In early telescopes (and in today’s medium-sized amateur telescopes) such nebulae look like small grayish patches of light. Since they don’t look like stars, but a bit like the gas giant planets, early astronomers tagged them as “planetary nebula,” and the name has stuck.
This is UGC 2369, a pair of galaxies in the process of merging. A tenuous bridge of gas, dust, and stars is connecting the two galaxies, UGC 2369N and UGC 2369S, as their mutual gravitation draws them together.
This is an image of the core fo the globular star cluster Messier 69. It is made up of visible light and infrared data taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The cluster was discovered by Charles Messier in 1780. It’s located 29,700 light-years from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius. It’s too dim to be seen with the naked eye, but it can be viewed with a pair of binoculars, especially during August.
