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Readers of the blog know that I sometimes go slightly off-topic to share my geek love for all things space. I love this particular image in particular, The Cat’s Eye Nebula:



Three thousand light years away from Earth, this nebula is 10,000 times as bright as the sun and is the result of a star that lost its outer envelope around 1000 years ago. There are 11 rings of gas make up the formation, which is expanding at a constant rate of 10 milliarcseconds a year.

In the Universe, even destruction is a thing of beauty.

In the US, we are winding down (hopefully) for the long Thanksgiving holiday. Hope that everyone has a fantastic time with family and friends — and eating of course! :)

** Next Tuesday, I’ll be announcing the winner of my Kindle Giveaway. There is still time to enter to win a brand new Kindle 4 plus a $20 Amazon gift card. The giveaway closes at midnight on Monday, November 28th so go ahead and enter — just leave a comment and tell me about your favorite books — simple and easy! **

As some of you already know, I kinda have a geek love for space and astromony, so sometimes I veer off-topic on the blog.

Yesterday during one of my Hubble procrastination browsing stints, I found a picture that fits in quite nicely with my earlier blog post this week. Bubbles anyone? :-)

Actually this is quite interesting: SNR 0509 is the result of gas shocked by an expanding blast wave from a supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a small galaxy about 160,000 light-years from Earth.

“The bubble-shaped shroud of gas is 23 light-years across and is expanding at more than 11 million miles per hour. [...] With an age of about 400 years as seen from Earth, the supernova might have been visible to southern hemisphere observers around the year 1600. However, there are no known records of a ‘new star’ in the direction of the LMC near that time.”

Okay, so we can’t take a road trip to go write in this particular bubble but you have to admit this is an amazing artifact in space.