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The pale band across a dark sky is part of the galaxy we live in. Its dark patches are often clouds hiding background starlight, and those same clouds can become bright subjects for infrared telescopes.
5 min readA spiral galaxy and its elongated neighbour share a view near the Great Bear. Their connection reaches beyond appearance: gravity, newborn stars and powerful gas flows.
5 min readA smaller magnitude means a brighter appearance, but one number cannot tell the whole story. Learn the scale, the role of distance and the difference between a sharp point and a faint extended glow.
4 min readThe faint patch in Andromeda contains a spiral galaxy, but its familiar stellar light shows only part of the system. An enormous gas envelope is studied through the light of even more distant objects.
5 min readA galaxy holds stars, gas, dust and dark matter together through gravity. Its shape and changing star population reveal a history far bigger than one star.
5 min readA grey smudge at the eyepiece and a glowing nebula in a photo can be the same object. The gap between them comes down to how light behaves, not what you're doing wrong.
5 min read