the-eldest-woman-on: ANTIQUE PRINT VINTAGE 1800S ASTRONOMY…
ANTIQUE PRINT VINTAGE 1800S ASTRONOMY SCIENCE STAR CHART MAP NEBULAE INDIGO
It’s so cool seeing these now that we have a detailed taxonomy for what each of them are. To the people who made the drawings they were all “nebulae”, clouds, fuzzy things in space, not stars or planets but not comets, either, because they held their position among the stars. They had structure, but it was all very dim and mysterious, at the limit of detection. What did it mean?
It makes me want to go back and lay the Hubble photos in front of them, show them what each thing is: This one’s a planetary nebula, the cast-off outer shell of a dying star. This one’s a cloud of gas and dust with new stars forming inside it. This one’s the leftover remnant of a supernova. And these — these are galaxies, great spirals like our own, but far beyond it, seen edge on, or face on, or interacting with each other, the trailing arms formed by millions of individual stars.
Reposted from http://ift.tt/1yQ3MP7.
