NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope captured an image of the ‘Enterprise’ nebula, which resembles the spacecraft seen in the Star Trek series. The image you see here lies within the disk of our Milky Way galaxy and shows two regions of star formation hidden behind a haze of dust when viewed in visible light.
Classified as IRAS 19340+2016 and IRAS19343+2026 (NCC-1701 and NCC-1701-D for Trekkies), this image was assembled using data from Spitzer’s biggest surveys of the Milky Way. These surveys – GLIMPSE and MIPSGAL – observed light with a wavelength of 3.5 microns in blue, 8.0 microns in green, and 24 microns in red. The green colors you see showcase the organic molecules in the dust clouds, illuminated by starlight, while the red colors are related to thermal radiation emitted from the hottest areas of dust.
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JPL manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at Caltech in Pasadena, California. Spacecraft operations are based at Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company, Littleton, Colorado. Data are archived at the Infrared Science Archive housed at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at Caltech,” said NASA.
