September 24th 2012
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120924.html
This picture shows a Nebula in the shape of a "Pencil". What it is, is a shock wave traveling at over 500,000 Km/h. What look like filaments are actually ripples in a sheet of glowing gas. From the angel of the earth, it looks like it's a pencil because we can only see the edge of it. While it looks small in the picture, it's actually about 5 light years long! And if that sounds long, it's only a small remnant of a supernova that happened over 11,000 years ago! This supernova was from the star Vela (the shock wave is called the Vela remnant so I'm assuming we labeled the former star Vela).
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