Today is the 13th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope's launch. In
order to celebrate that anniversary, the Hubble people have released a
particularly nice photograph of a small region of the Swan Nebula in
Sagittarius:

     http://hubble.esa.int/hubble/news/image.cfm?oid=32161&ooid=32151

Just to give a sense of scale, while the nebula itself is 5500 lyr away, the
image's diagonal is almost exactly the distance from the Earth to our nearest
star, Alpha Centauri, 4.5 lyr. The nebula is a hotbed of current star
formation, providing the gaseous material for both the formation of new stars
and planetary systems. Being in a much older, quieter part of the galaxy, we
have nothing like the gas and dust you see in this picture in our local
interstellar medium.

Wirt Atmar

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