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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! **

For the new readers of the blog, I sometimes go slightly off-topic to share my space geek love.

The Hubble telescope is celebrating its 20th birthday this month. Last week, a photo was released of the Carina Nebula, the largest seen star-birth regions in the galaxy. Astronomers have nicknamed it “Mystic Mountain.”

The Universe Today blog shares some information about Carina Nebula:

“‘Mystic Mountain has clouds of gas and dust, that have not only baby stars, but also baby solar systems,’ said John Grunsfeld, Hubble-hugger, repairman and now the Deputry Director of the Space Telescope Science Institute. ‘4.5 billion years ago, this may be what our solar system looked like.’”

I love this stuff and find it fascinating and the photo is breath-taking. There is so much in this Universe — things we probably can’t even imagine.

Have a great weekend everyone. I hope that you get some writing done!

On Monday, I will reveal the two winners of my Blog Anniversary Book Giveaway. Stay tuned.

One of my core interests is space and astronomy. I’m especially fond of looking at the images captured by the Hubble telescope. I’m so glad that NASA decided to fix it.

This is one of my favorite images: NGC 6302 or The Butterfly Nebula. It does live within our Milky Way galaxy, but it’s almost 3,800 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius.

It looks beautiful and serene but it’s not.

According to the NASA site:

“What resemble dainty butterfly wings are actually roiling cauldrons of gas heated to more than 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The gas is tearing across space at more than 600,000 miles an hour — fast enough to travel from Earth to the moon in 24 minutes!

A dying star that was once about five times the mass of the Sun is at the center of this fury. It has ejected its envelope of gases and is now unleashing a stream of ultraviolet radiation that is making the cast-off material glow.”

That is so interesting! Well, at least to me it is. Space is so vast and endless. Beautiful and yet very dangerous—for us humans at least. I hope that within my lifetime, we will discover a world-changing artifact in space.

Alfred A Knopf/Random House have created a slide show of beautiful, sometimes stunning images from outer space transmitted from the Hubble Telescope, and tied that in to the publication of Brian Greene’s Icarus at the Edge of Time(a fable about Icarus). The Hubble Telescope has been in the news lately and discussed online, so to me this is smart marketing and book promotion–tying in a book to a timely subject.

What do you think? Does it work?

Can you think of other novels and works of fiction that have been tied in to news events?