
Subscribe Give a Gift Archives Customer Service SEARCH Health Medicine Mind Brain Technology Space Human Origins Living World Environment Physics Math Video Photos Podcast RSS MESSENGER’s first picture from Mercury orbit More Mercury An ionized rose would smell as sweet I’m such a sucker for emission nebulae , the sites of intense star formation . Part of that is because I spent years researching other types of gaseous clouds , but also because they’re just so darn pretty , like this shot of NGC 371 Click to ennebulenate , or get the 2000 x 2000 pixel version NGC 371 is in the Small Magellanic Cloud , a companion galaxy to our Milky Way . That puts it at a distance of about 200,000 light years , or 2 quintillion 2,000,000,000,000,000,000 . kilometers In this kinda-sorta false color image