Photograph #1 (September 2006)
Spitzer's Orion
Would you have guessed that these are the stars in the constellation Orion?
What we see depends on how WE look at it.
Who can recognize and decipher the actions of people in another culture? When we are not familiar with the perspectives of that culture, they might as well be in a different galaxy.
- Daniel Benor, MD
Photo credit: Thomas Megeath (Univ. Toledo) et al., JPL, Caltech, NASA
Just as light and gravity extend forever, connecting galaxies, stars and planets across the universe, so our consciousness extends everywhere and everywhen.
- Daniel J. Benor, MD
How Can I Heal What Hurts
Few cosmic vistas excite the imagination like the Orion Nebula, an immense stellar nursery some 1,500 light-years away. Also known as M42, the nebula is visible to the unaided eye, but this stunning infrared view from the Spitzer Space Telescope penetrates the turbulent cosmic gas and dust clouds to explore the region in unprecedented detail. At full resolution, the remarkable image data yields a census of new stars and potential solar systems. About 2,300 young stars surrounded by planet-forming disks were detected based on the infrared glow of their warm dust, along with about 200 stellar embryos, stars too young to have developed disks. This 0.8 by 1.4 degree false-color image is about 20 light-years wide at the distance of the Orion Nebula.
