Ever get the feeling you're being watched?
This NASA Hubble pic looks like a spooky pair of glowing eyes staring right at you. What looks like a creepy face, is actually two merging galaxies, collectively known as Arp-Madore 2026-42.
The piercing yellow eyes are the bright cores of the galaxies, and the ghostly blue ring around them is made of young stars. This kind of head-on collision is rare, and the shape won’t last long. In a billion or two years, the two galaxies will merge completely.
Check out the original post here: NASA: Hubble Views Arp-Madore 2026-424.
LDN43 is better known as the Cosmic Bat Nebula, and it’s easy to see why: it looks like a giant, spooky bat flying through space.
This bat-shaped cloud of gas and dust is about 1400 light-years away and it’s so thick that it blocks out light from stars behind it, even from a nearby glowing nebula. The glowing eerie light from the nebula comes from new stars being born inside its stellar nursery.
Read more about LDN 43 here from Sky & Telescope: The Cosmic Bat Nebula – LDN43.
The Sun turns into a Hallowe'en pumpkin
The Sun looks like a spooky jack-o-lantern in this Hallowe’en image from the Solar Dynamics Observatory. Dark patches and bright spots form the face of a creepy glowing pumpkin.
These bright areas are super active, filled with powerful magnetic fields. The image combines two special wavelengths of light to make it look extra spooky.
Check out the original article here: NASA: Our Halloween Sun.
Interstellar kaiju haunt the pillars of creation
The James Webb Space Telescope’s mid-infrared image of the Pillars of Creation looks almost like a giant space monster.
You might also think it looks like a spooky hand with dusty or sooty fingers reaching out across the stars, but these pillars of gas and dust hide stars that are slowly forming over many millennia.
The Pillars of Creation stand within the vast Eagle Nebula, about 6500 light-years away. The thousands of stars we usually see in images of the ‘pillars’ are hidden in this mid-infrared view, painting a haunting scene of swirling gas and dust. The red regions are where the dust is coolest and densest, and the dark areas are the thickest, where stars are still forming.
Check out the original article here: JWST reveals dust and structure in Pillars of Creation.
A spooky galactic ghoul
The ‘Great Galactic Ghoul’ is a joke once made up to explain why Mars probes repeatedly failed on their missions, but DR 6 is a ghoul of a different kind.
Star forming nebula DR 6 is located about 4000 light years away, and astronomers have described it as looking like a freakish space face, emphasising the cavity-like regions that look like eyes and a mouth. The ghoul’s ‘eyes’ were hollowed out by intense heat and winds from young stars, and to give you a sense of scale, the ghoul’s ‘nose’ is about 3.5 light years long.
Check out the original article here: Star Formation Region DR 6.
The scariest image in astronomy
It might not look so spooky, but this image strikes fear into the hearts of stargazers around the world.
Satellite megaconstellations are changing our night sky, and not for the better. There are already 5,601 orbiting satellites in the Starlink constellation alone, and the International Astronomy Union is concerned how this could impact stargazing,
The IAU says we don’t understand the potential impact of thousands of satellite megaconstellations yet, and how they may threaten dark and radio-quiet skies. Light pollution also directly affects stars-based Indigenous traditions and knowledge systems worldwide, who observe and interpret stellar positions for their daily life and cultural continuity.
Check out a real time Starlink satellite constellation map here: starlinkmap.org
Read more about how you can help tackle the growing problem in our article How You Can Make a Difference in Reducing Light Pollution.
Jay Chesters is a freelance journalist, feature writer, and award-winning author. With a particular passion for stargazing and astronomy, Jay enjoys any opportunity to share stories or pass on what they know.
