9 February 2011
Stars Versus Mountains
NGC 2174 is an HII emission nebula in the constellation Orion. The mountainous structures in this picture comprise interstellar dust, which as we have recently studied, is a substance thinner than air containing mostly hydrogen and helium. It's pretty surprising that it covers an area of the full moon, but it wouldn't look nearly this glamorous in the nighttime sky because it's been false color-mapped. The fact that a substance so thin can produce these features in high enough quantities, gives one a sense of how vast the distances between stars are.
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