DickC wrote:
Beautiful!!! How far away is that??
According to Sky Safari, The distance to the nebula is not precisely known, with estimates ranging from 1,400 to 2,600 light-years. When you consider that light can travel around the world 7 1/2 time in one second......that a one light year is then about 5.88 trillion miles. A long way. I think the one thing that has me so intrigued is not so much the distance these DSO are away from our solar system....but fact that the photons that struck my sensor to render an image left this nebula (which is a supernova remnant) when man first discovered fire.
I keep this TIMELINE handy to refer to those relationships in chronology.
Counting Backwards from Now
60 years ago - Invention of the computer.
130 years ago - Invention of the telephone.
180 years ago - Fossil fuel revolution: coal, trains.
540 years ago - Invention of the printing press.
5,500 years ago - Invention of the wheel, writing.
7,600 years ago - Sahara desert starts forming in northern Africa.
8,800 years ago - The first cities.
10,300 years ago - End of the most recent glacial period: the Wisconsin glaciation.
12,700 - 11,500 years ago - the Younger Dryas.
18,000 years ago - Cultivation of plants, herding of animals. Homo sapiens arrives in the Americas.
21,000 years ago - Last glacial maximum: ice sheets down to the Great Lakes, the mouth of the Rhine, and covering the British Isles.
32,000 years ago - Oldest known cave paintings.
35,000 years ago - Invention of the calendar, extinction of Homo neanderthalensis. Homo sapiens arrives in Europe.
50,000 years ago - Homo sapiens arrives in central Asia.
100,000 years ago - Homo sapiens arrives in the Middle East.
110,000 years ago - Beginning of the most recent glacial period: the Wisconsin glaciation.
130,000 years ago - Beginning of the Eemian interglacial.
200,000 years ago - Beginning of the 2nd most recent glacial period: the Wolstonian glaciation.
250,000 years ago - First Homo sapiens.
350,000 years ago - First Homo neanderthalensis.
380,000 years ago - Beginning of the Hoxnian interglacial.
450,000 years ago - Beginning of the 3rd most recent glacial period: the Kansan glaciation, during which ice sheets reached their maximum extent in the Pleistocene, down to Kansas and Slovakia.
620,000 years ago - Beginning of the Cromerian interglacial.
1.4 million years ago - First firemaking by humans.
1.9 million years ago - First Homo erectus.
2.5 million years ago - First Homo habilis. Beginning of a period of repeated glaciation (loosely speaking, "ice ages").
3 million years - Cooling trend causes year-round ice to form at the North Pole.
3.9 million years ago - First known Australopithecus afarensis.
5 million years ago - Humans split off from other apes (gorillas and chimpanzees).
21 million years ago - Apes split off from other monkeys.
24 million years ago - Cooling trend causes the formation of grasslands; Antarctica becomes covered with ice.
34 million years ago - Gondwanaland finishes breaking up, with Australia and South America separating from Antarctica.
50 million years ago - India begins to collide with Asia, eventually forming the Himalayas.
67 million years ago - Asteroid hits Mexico, causing the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction. End of dinosaurs. 50% of all species died out! Intensification of world cooling trend.
114 million years ago - First modern mammals. World begins to cool.
150 million years ago - First birds.
200 million years ago - Pangaea began to split into separate continents: Gondwana to the south and Laurasia to the north, separated by the Tethys Sea.