Doradus Nebula The Star Nursery Wall Fountain

What you're seeing here are young ice-blue stars being born. They're only a few million years old, mere babies inside the Doradus 30 Nebula, a region in the Large Magellanic Cloud which is a satellite galaxy to our own Milky Way.

That's a mouthful to say, but these young stars are giving astronomers important information about the birth as well as the evolution of stars. All you or I really need to get from this is the grand scale of the magic of it all. Galaxies that are themselves a thousand light years across...existing like tiny pinwheels in an even grander crucible of space. Measurements of time, space, heat, distance...power quickly become impossible to conceive of. What is a hundred million degrees? How far away is a hundred million light years? When I look at these images, it is a reminder to me that there are things a bit more important than ourselves.

Anyway... This is the sort of image that has great depth, mostly because of the innate magic in back-painting, but partly because I'm slowly getting better at this. I find myself getting snookered by the images...peering into them, not at them and trying to figure it all out. This is about as philosophical as I get on my website. Apologies for that.

Dimensions:

• Height: 48"
• Width: 28"