Gorgeous and upsetting that I'll never be able to visit it.
13 billion years before me, potentially trillions of years after me. Seems like such a waste of the spark of awareness that I can't take that awareness and experience the galaxy in all its glory.
> Seems like such a waste of the spark of awareness that I can't take that awareness and experience the galaxy in all its glory.
But you just did. That's what we're doing.
The horse head part that we see is 3x4 LY in size. If you wanted to experience that horse head like you would, say, a mountain -- just a large, field of view dominating visage. You would need to be about 20+ Lightyears away from it.
I don't know how bright the nebula is, but after 20 lightyears, I don't know how much the human eye could perceive it. And, likely, by the time you got close enough to actually see it, it may well just be a hazy cloud with no definition, since you'd be so close.
Things like these may only be able to be experienced by us through artificial means. Through embellishment and enhancement.
You can go and buy a "smart telescope" today that you can push a button, and point it at any of the "local" nebulas or other bright objects in the sky. Yet, if you look through the eyepiece, you won't see much. Even with magnification, it's a gray, fuzzy blob. The smart telescope will automatically capture more light, through longer exposures, and create a composite image with better definition and detail. Even with magnification, we can not experience those objects directly.
Astronomy, for me, is most "personal" with a pair of binoculars, particular a pair of stabilized binoculars. A mundane pair will open up the sky in a breathtaking way. Because it's more "real". It's not a picture on screen, and it wide and sweeping and huge.
But you can't really get those really fun Milky Way photos folks are making, not with binoculars. You CAN see the Milky Way under dark skies, but not like those photo capture them.
So, simply, "you can shut up. Stop typing now. Really", you may well have just experience the nebula as best as it can be done right now. Run that video on a huge TV in a dark room, it will help. Maybe see if any of this stuff is coming to an IMAX theater near you.
I think "dust" is a term of art in astronomy. A cloud of rocks the size of cars could be dust. I suppose that if you can't resolve the particles, then it's dust.
If I look at this part of the Orion Nebula, it looks opaque; I can't see what's behind it. So I guess if I were in the middle of the nebula, then I wouldn't be able to see out of it. There are many stars in the nebula that are not visible (in visible light).
So I suppose that what you'd see would depend on where in the nebula you were sitting; if you were near a star, the dust would be illuminated, and the sky would be bright. If you were not near a star, presumably the sky would be dark, and you'd look up and see nothing, like the inhabitants of the planet Cricket.
There are multiple types of nebulae. Absorption nebula (or dark nebula) and reflection nebula are clouds of "dust" (more likely lots of rocks).
There are also emission nebula which are clouds of ionized gases that emit light.
The horsehead nebula is an absorption nebula that sits in front of light-emitting emission nebula. It's fairly easy to image the horsehead with a star tracker and DSLR, though not to this level of detail.
Why will there only be trillions of years after you? Why not quadrillions? Couldn't we just pick an arbitrary number up to the largest variety of infinity?
13 billion years before me, potentially trillions of years after me. Seems like such a waste of the spark of awareness that I can't take that awareness and experience the galaxy in all its glory.