According to my software, this blog post you are reading is the 7000th article I have published on the Bad Astronomy Blog.

Wow.

Thats a lot of words. Its also a lot of astronomy, geekery, science, antiscience, web comics, puns, embiggenates, and "Holy Haleakala!"s (61, to be exact, plus this one to make 62).

I am generally not one to wade into maudlin celebrations of arbitrary numbers, so instead Ill celebrate this milestone by showing you something appropriate: the North America Nebula, taken by Mexican astronomer Csar Cant.

[Click to encontinentenate.]

Why is this appropriate? Because the New General Catalog of astronomical objects familiar to and used by astronomers across the planet lists it as entry number 7000.

And it should be obvious why its named as it is.

Of course, I cant leave you with just a pretty picture. This nebula is something of a mystery; we dont know how big it is or how far away it lies. In the sky, its very near the star Deneb which marks the tail of the swan constellation Cygnus and Deneb is a massive, hot, and luminous star. Its possible the gas in the nebula is glowing due to the light from Deneb; if so NGC 7000 is about 1800 light years away and over 100 light years across.

Its the site of furious star formation, too, with stars being born all along the bright sharp region which look like Mexico and Central America. The "Gulf of Mexico" region the darker area with fewer stars is actually the location of thick interstellar dust that blocks the light from the stars behind it. Visible light, that is; the dust glow in the infrared, so if you look at it with a telescope that sees IR like the Spitzer Space Telescope, what is invisible becomes ethereally visible:

Read the rest here:

7000 | Bad Astronomy