The Eye of God

I found this image on the internet and it amazed me, saving it to my hard drive happened without even thinking considering that skyimagelab.com is selling them for $10.85 American for an 8X10 print, I prefer the old right click and Save Image As option.

NASA photographed this from the Hubble Space Telescope and is also called the Helix Nebula. It's boring technical designation is NGC 7293 but that doesn't matter, it doesn't sound half as cool as the other ones. It's about 650 light years away in the direction of the constellation Aquarius and it's about 2.5 light years wide. The remaining center of the stellar cored, which is destined to become a white dwarf star, glows with light so energetic that it causes the gases already expelled to glow and illuminate. Planetary nebulae are created at the end of a Sun-like star's life span and this is the closest example that we have of one.

In February of 2007 two comets collided in the middle of the nebula near the dead star and it was a great surprise to those observing the entity, so of course they went multi-million dollar camera happy. The large amounts of dust around the nebula are said to be from comets that survived the death of their star and are still smashing into each other. Thanks to this, the radiation from the stellar corpse keep lighting up the dust; giving it such wonderful colours. Scientists say that it won't last long, in 10,000 years the clouds will fade; I'm almost afraid that my grandchildren won't see it.

It is said that is approximately 5 million years our own sun will have grown into a white dwarf, only the outer large planets left, and will also pass away in the same spectacular manner. I'd say that's a load of male cow dung but I'm not getting paid thousands of dollars to take pictures with expensive cameras and stare through telescopes for hours on end while I sit in a lazyboy-resembling chair. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against astronomers; I would enjoy being one myself, but I don't believe many of their theories so I'd never get hired.