Dear Lookout Observers,

I hope each one of you is safe and keeping your distance from others, since even people who are not sick may be unknowingly spreading the coronavirus. If you are like me, you are spending most of your time during this pandemic holed up in your home and sometimes going a bit stir crazy. What better time to escape into outer space? And if your brain is feeling a bit mushy like mine is, you don’t want a bunch of technical stuff straining it right now. So how about some animals? Everybody like animals, right?

The first picture is one you have probably seen before. It is probably the most famous dark nebula in the sky – the Horsehead Nebula. It is located in the constellation Orion, and it really looks like a horse’s head poking out of that dark cloud.

To find the next animal we start with the next picture, a view of the dark sky from Lookout Observatory in the fall at about 9 PM, looking straight up. Overhead we see the magnificient Milky Way. The triangular shaped pinkish nebula somewhat to the right of the center of the diagonal line of the Milky Way is the North American Nebula. But if you look closely just above the center of this streak of Milky Way, you will see a darker reddish spot about the same size as the brighter, pink North American nebula. It is hard to see.

I try to help orient you in the next picture by drawing in lines of the constellations in green and I show the reddish spot I’m talking about in the center, outlined in blue. If you were facing south and looking straight up, and then you arched your back so you were looking behind you, you would see the north star and the little dipper, which is at the top of this picture. The north star is the bright one at the end of the handle. If you look to the left side, you see a sideways “W.” That’s the constellation Cassiopeia. And just to the right of it is something that looks like a house with an irregular bottom, or maybe a blank face with a pointed wizard hat on top. That’s the constellation Cepheus, and that’s where that little blue rectangle is.

The next picture is an enlargement of that tiny area of the sky. Now you can see that there is extensive red nebulosity and a bit of blueish nebulosity, and this picture doesn’t even include all of it. It appears so large in the sky that more than 30 full moons could fit inside of it! It is too faint to see with the naked eye; it takes long exposures, like this one of more than 2 hours, to show it well. It goes by the exciting name of IC 1396. Now if you take the area of nebulosity that is outlined in blue, turn it sideways and enlarge it, you will get our last picture.

Here finally is the animal we have been searching for. It is called the Elephant Trunk Nebula, just a small part of IC 1396. The elephant has a yellowish eye which, if you look closely, is a bit bloodshot. But I’m sure he’ll be OK if he can just find the rest of his body, which seems to have disappeared into the clouds! And finally, if you look down near the bottom, you can see a bunny facing left, silhouetted against the deep red light. It almost looks like the elephant is squirting some water out of the end of his trunk onto the bunny Good things come in threes – horse, elephant, bunny – so that’s it for now.

Stay safe,

Carter, (sometime) Resident Astronomer,

Lookout Observatory