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[jlvsclrk]

Look! See the gorgeous new icon made for me by ctbn60. I actually had to choose between three stunning versions. The other two were more overtly related to Smallville - one omitted the supernova explosion and instead had a last image of Krypton (the Planet) with the message 'Clark Kent was born here'. The other had a last slide after the supernova explosion saying Krypton: Gone but not forgotten. I love both, but settled on this one because I find the imagery so beautiful.

The Milky Way - galactic centre in Sagittarius It doesn't look this pink to the naked eye of course - that has to do with the eyes' sensitivity to light compared to a camera's, especially for longer exposures. But on a truly dark site during summer, the Milky Way is utterly stunning. Finding those dark skies is the real challenge for most.	The Lagoon and Trifid nebulae The red Lagoon Nebula (M8) lies at the bottom center of this 50-minute exposure, from Astronomy Magazine. You can also see the Trifid Nebula (M20) in the upper right: it combines a blue reflection nebula and a red emission nebula. Notice the very bright centre of the nebulae, where stars are being born, providing the energy to light up the surrounding gas.
Globular cluster Globular clusters form the "halo" of a galaxy. They consist of tens of thousands, even millions of stars, most of which are small, reddish and old - the bigger bluish ones have long since exploded. With stars, it's all about mass. The bigger you are, the hotter you burn, the quicker you burn out.	The Abell Galaxy Cluster Courtesy of the Hubble Space Telescope, this image shows a galaxy cluster in the centre. Just as stars tend to form in clumps, so too do galaxies. Physicists don't quite have the reasons all worked out yet! This galaxy cluster also causes gravitational lensing of the light from more distant objects, which explains a lot of the wierd streaks.
M74 in Pisces M74 is one of the best examples of a face-on spiral galaxy, and is similar to our own Milky Way Galaxy if we could view it from the right angle. Note that the spiral arms are dotted with reddish areas of intense star birth activity. It's about 30 million light years away, so relatively close by galactic standards. Its one of my leading candidate's for Clark's galaxy of origin.	Crab Nebula in Pisces The Crab Nebula is a supernova remnant, the leftovers of the explosion of a relatively nearby star - "only" 6300 light years away. The explosion was observed in 1054 when it was easily visible by day for about a month, then faded away. Now using a good telescope, you can only see the expanding bubble of gas, which is lit up by the energetic but extremely faint pulsar at the centrer. If the original star had been somewhat more massive, the explosion would have created a black hole.