Behold: 100 Planetary Nebulas

By Nancy Atkinson - September 29, 2014 at 5:09 PM UTC | Stars
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If you like planetary nebulas, you're in luck. Multimedia artist

Judy Schmidt

has put together an amazing collection of 100 of these colorful glowing shells of gas and plasma, all at apparent size relative to one another. There's even a giant-sized 10,000 pixel-wide version

available on Flickr

.

How many of these planetary nebulae can you identify?

Judy explained her inspiration for putting together this wonderful 'poster':

Inspired by insect illustration posters, this is a large collage of planetary nebulas I put together bit by bit as I processed them. All are presented north up and at apparent size relative to one another--I did not rotate or resize them in order to satisfy compositional aesthetics (if you spot any errors, let me know). Colors are aesthetic choices, especially since most planetary nebulas are imaged with narrowband filters.

Planetary nebulae are formed by certain types of stars at the end of their lives, and actually have nothing to do with planets. They were given the confusing name 300 years ago by William Herschel because in early, rudimentary telescopes, the puffed out balls of gas looked like planets.

Our own Sun will likely undergo a similar process, but not for another 5 billion years or so.

You can see more of Judy's work at her website "

Geckzilla

" or

Flickr page

.

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy Atkinson is a space journalist and author with a passion for telling the stories of people involved in space exploration and astronomy. She is currently retired from daily writing, but worked at Universe Today for 20 years as a writer and editor. She also contributed articles to The Planetary Society, Ad Astra (National Space Society), New Scientist and many other online outlets.

Her 2019 book, "Eight Years to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Missions,” shares the untold stories of engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make the Apollo program so successful, despite the daunting odds against it. Her first book “Incredible Stories From Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos” (2016) tells the stories of 37 scientists and engineers that work on several current NASA robotic missions to explore the solar system and beyond.

Nancy is also a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador, and through this program, she has the opportunity to share her passion of space and astronomy with children and adults through presentations and programs. Nancy's personal website is nancyatkinson.com