Zooming in on the Horsehead Nebula (3D)

2013-04-18 1

This video zooms into part of the sky in the constellation of Orion (The Hunter), showing the new infrared Hubble observations of the Horsehead Nebula (otherwise known as Barnard 33). The video ends on a 3D fly-through of the nebula.

The video continues with a scientific visualisation of a flight into the infrared Horsehead. The computer graphics model is intended to be scientifically reasonable, but not fully accurate.

This new infrared image has been released to celebrate 23 years of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The data in this video come from Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, supplemented by ground-based observations from the European Southern Observatory’s Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA).

More information and downlaod-options:
http://www.spacetelescope.org/videos/heic1307b/

Credit:
NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA); G. Bacon, T. Borders, L. Frattare, Z. Levay, and F. Summers (Viz 3D team, STScI); ESO.