Daily Telescope: Cygnus Wall lights up the night sky

Zoom in / Chicken wall.

Mel Martin

Welcome to Daily Telescope. There is too little darkness in this world and not enough light, too little pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let the other posts provide your daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we'll take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe full of stars and wonders.

Good morning. It's January 16, and today we travel 2,600 light-years out into space to the Cygnus Wall.

Although this sounds like some kind of barrier between galaxies, the name Cygnus Wall has a more mundane origin, as it looks like a wall and is located in the constellation Cygnus. It's the brightest region of the so-called North American Nebula, which in some images looks like the outline of North America.

The Cygnus Wall, if you use your imagination, looks a bit like Central America and Mexico. It is an active star-forming region with lots of hydrogen and sulfur, which produce the red colors in this image, and oxygen, shown in blue. This feature is about 20 light-years across, or more than six times the diameter of our solar system.

Mel Martin sent in this photo taken from a backyard observatory in Arizona. lovable.

source: Mel Martin

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