More than Meets the Eye

The image below is what you see when you step outside your home on a nice winter evening and gaze skyward. The familiar constellation Orion is just above the house. Sirius, the brightest star visible, is down and to the left. The faint "V" shaped head of Taurus is slightly above and to the right of Orion. The Pleiades star cluster is a little more above and to the right of that. I love the winter sky. There's so much to see. But there's so much more that we can't see.


This picture is a mosaic of 40 hours of photos taken of the same sky as above. What you see are the many nebulae that fill up much of the sky. The human eye isn't able to just stare at the sky in long exposure like a camera and draw in enough light to see such faint objects. It would be cool though if we could.