Categories: Where In the Universe?

Test Your Astronomical Knowledge With This Week’s “WITU” Challenge

It’s Wednesday, so that means its time for another “Where In The Universe” (WITU) challenge to test your visual knowledge of the cosmos. This one might be relatively easy, but I’m feeling generous today. Guess what this image is, and give yourself extra points if you can guess which spacecraft is responsible for the image. As always, don’t peek below before you make your guess. Comments on how you did are welcome.

Ready? Go!

This is the Eskimo Nebula (NGC 2392), so named because it resembles a person’s head surrounded by a parka hood. But its also known as the Clownface Nebula. In 2000, the Hubble Space Telescope produced this image. NGC 2392 lies about 3000 light-years away and is visible with a small telescope, found in the constellation of Gemini.

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The gas clouds in this nebula are unusual and complex, and aren’t fully understood. Its a planetary nebula, and the gas seen above composed the outer layers of a Sun-like star only 10,000 years ago. The inner filaments visible above are being ejected by strong wind of particles from the central star. The outer disk contains unusual light-year long orange filaments.

How’d you do?

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy has been with Universe Today since 2004, and has published over 6,000 articles on space exploration, astronomy, science and technology. She is the author of two books: "Eight Years to the Moon: the History of the Apollo Missions," (2019) which shares the stories of 60 engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make landing on the Moon possible; and "Incredible Stories from Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos" (2016) tells the stories of those who work on NASA's robotic missions to explore the Solar System and beyond. Follow Nancy on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Nancy_A and and Instagram at and https://www.instagram.com/nancyatkinson_ut/