Astronomy often uses artists impressions to attempt to capture what something we couldn’t possibly see, may look like. It has it’s faults and can be misleading at times, but while the above looks like such a thing, it’s actually an image taken by a back garden telescope around $1000 and some filters and photoshop palette adjustments.
That may sound like it’s cheating a little, but it’s an important part of trying to highlight areas of interest, which otherwise would be not so apparent.
The Carina Nebula is one of the most beautiful parts of the night sky, with Eta Carina once being one of the brightest stars in our night sky in the 1830s, but if you see it now, you’ll understand why it’s not so bright.
An outburst of matter has concealed it somewhat, although over time it has slowly began to brighten up.
This star periodically blows off huge amounts of matter from it’s atmosphere, and will eventually go supernova having previously been a blue giant, and moved to a Wolf Rayet phase we see today.
