NASA's Space Telescope Captures A Green Spider Nebula

A Spider nebula, which is officially named as IC 417, was captured using the NASA's Spitzer Space telescope together with the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS).

NASA states that the green nebula is sited about 10,000 light-years from the Earth. It exists in the outer part of the Milky Way. A group of scientists, teachers and students were working on recognizing the stars in this region as part of their NASA/IPAC Teacher Archive Research program (NITARP) in 2015.

In the image (shown in the video below),  the "Stock 8", which is a group of stars, can be spotted at the right of the epicenter. The light from this cluster shapes as a bowl near dust clouds, which is the green fluff. There are also young stars that are clumped in the green.

The infrared wavelengths, which are concealed to the unaided eye, have been given visible colors. As detected by 2MASS, the light with a wavelength of 1.2 microns is in blue color. On the other hand, the Spitzer wavelength of 4.5 microns is red in color and the 3.6 microns is green.

The 2MASS mission was a joint effort of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena and the NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.

Nebula is a Latin word which means cloud. It is an interstellar cloud of helium, dust, hydrogen and other ionized gasses. Nebulae are mostly vast in size with hundreds of light years in diameter.

It is also named for any diffuse astronomical object such as the galaxies beyond the Milky Way. For example, the Andromeda Galaxy was once denoted to as the Andromeda Nebula. Among the other types of Nebulae are the Cat's Eye Nebula, Herbig-Haro Object, The Red Rectangle Nebula, Omega Nebula, Horsehead Nebula, the delicate shell of SNR B0509-67.5 and the Tycho Supernova.