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NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Do you recognize this constellation? Although it is one of the most recognizable star groupings on the sky, this is a more full Orion than you can see -- an Orion only revealed with long exposure digital camera imaging and post- processing. Here the cool red giant Betelgeuse takes on a strong orange tint as the brightest star on the upper left. Orion's hot blue stars are numerous, with supergiant Rigel balancing Betelgeuse on the lower right, and Bellatrix at the upper right. Lined up in Orion's belt are three stars all about 1,500 light-years away, born from the constellation's well-studied interstellar clouds. Just below Orion's belt is a bright but fuzzy patch that might also look familiar -- the stellar nursery known as Orion's Nebula. Finally, just barely visible to the unaided eye but quite striking here is Barnard's Loop -- a huge gaseous emission nebula surrounding Orion's Belt and Nebula discovered over 100 years ago by the pioneering Orion photographer E. E. Barnard.

Photo by Michele Guzzini

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Sometimes, it's the stars that are the hardest to see that are the most interesting. IC 348 is a young star cluster that illuminates surrounding filamentary dust. The stringy and winding dust appears pink in this recently released infrared image from the Webb Space Telescope. In visible light, this dust reflects mostly blue light, giving the surrounding material the familiar blue hue of a reflection nebula. Besides bright stars, several cool objects have been located in IC 348, visible because they glow brighter in infrared light. These objects are hypothesized to be low mass brown dwarfs. Evidence for this includes the detection of an unidentified atmospheric chemical, likely a hydrocarbon, seen previously in the atmosphere of Saturn. These objects appear to have masses slightly greater than known planets, only a few times greater than Jupiter. Together, these indicate that this young star cluster contains something noteworthy -- young planet-mass brown dwarfs that float free, not orbiting any other star.

Claude Lorrain (c. 1600 –1682) was a French artist of the Baroque era. His actual name was Claude Gellee, but he is better known by the province in which he was born. He spent most of his life in Italy, and is regarded as one of the great masters of ideal landscape and known for his golden-hued pastoral landscapes which usually include the addition of a few small figures, typically representing a scene from the Bible or classical mythology. More

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