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Tis the season for all sorts of silly, fun, holiday-themed news stories. And this humble blog post is no different.
If you haven’t seen it yet, follow this link to check out the picture of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) that resides in the 30 Doradus Nebula. It’s called R136.
There’s a lot to like about R136: it’s the “most detailed view of the largest stellar nursery in our local galactic neighborhood;” this picture of it was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and spans about 100 light years; and, oh yeah, it looks very much like the image of a Christmas tree. See it?
This star cluster is a mere 170,000 light years from Earth, which allows the Hubble to take these incredibly detailed photos. We doubt that we could capture such an image with the 10 megapixel camera we got for Christmas last year — although that remains a lovely and cherished gift.