Just weeks after NASA astronauts repaired the Hubble Space Telescope in
December 1999, the Hubble Heritage Project snapped this picture of NGC
1999, a nebula in the constellation Orion. The Heritage astronomers, in
collaboration with scientists in Texas and Ireland, used Hubble's Wide
Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) to obtain the color image. NGC 1999
is an example of a reflection nebula. Like fog around a street lamp, a
reflection nebula shines only because the light from an imbedded source
illuminates its dust; the nebula does not emit any visible light of its
own. NGC 1999 lies close to the famous Orion Nebula, about 1,500
light-years from Earth, in a region of our Milky Way galaxy where new
stars are being formed actively. NGC 1999 was discovered some two
centuries ago by Sir William Herschel and his sister Caroline, and was
cataloged later in the 19th century as object 1999 in the New General
Catalogue. This data was collected in January 2000 by the Hubble
Heritage Team with the collaboration of star-formation experts C. Robert
O'Dell (Rice University), Thomas P. Ray (Dublin Institute for Advanced
Study), and David Corcoran (University of Limerick).
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