NIGHT OVER ONTARIO

These photos were taken by Lynn Hilborn of Grafton, Ontario.
Pictures have appeared on the cover and inside editions of SkyNews magazine and in Sky & Telescope and Astronomy magazine, and as NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day.

“ Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,”
W.B.Yeats

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Barnard's Merope Nebula IC 349 in M45<br />
Image taken by Lynn Hilborn, WhistleStop Obs,Grafton, Ontario. on November 7, 2013. TEC 140 @f5.3 and ML8300 camera with Baader filters. LRGB L 16x45s, RGB 15x30s all binned 1x1.<br />
In 1890, American astronomer E. E. Barnard, observing visually with the Lick Observatory 36-inch telescope in California, discovered an exceptionally bright nebulosity adjacent to the bright Pleiades star Merope. IC349 is a very small object, about 20 arc seconds across. "Barnard's Merope Nebula." IC 349 is so bright because it lies extremely close to Merope -- only about 3,500 times the separation of the Earth from the Sun, or about 0.06 light-year -- and thus is strongly illuminated by the star's light.<br />
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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has caught the eerie, wispy tendrils of this dark interstellar cloud being destroyed by the passage of one of the brightest stars in the Pleiades star cluster. Like a flashlight beam shining off the wall of a cave, the star is reflecting light off the surface of pitch black clouds of cold gas laced with dust - these are called reflection nebulae.

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Barnard's Merope Nebula IC 349 in M45
Image taken by Lynn Hilborn, WhistleStop Obs,Grafton, Ontario. on November 7, 2013. TEC 140 @f5.3 and ML8300 camera with Baader filters. LRGB L 16x45s, RGB 15x30s all binned 1x1.
In 1890, American astronomer E. E. Barnard, observing visually with the Lick Observatory 36-inch telescope in California, discovered an exceptionally bright nebulosity adjacent to the bright Pleiades star Merope. IC349 is a very small object, about 20 arc seconds across. "Barnard's Merope Nebula." IC 349 is so bright because it lies extremely close to Merope -- only about 3,500 times the separation of the Earth from the Sun, or about 0.06 light-year -- and thus is strongly illuminated by the star's light.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has caught the eerie, wispy tendrils of this dark interstellar cloud being destroyed by the passage of one of the brightest stars in the Pleiades star cluster. Like a flashlight beam shining off the wall of a cave, the star is reflecting light off the surface of pitch black clouds of cold gas laced with dust - these are called reflection nebulae.