Nuages d'Andromede
Image Credit & Copyright:
Daniel López /
IAC
What are those red clouds surrounding the Andromeda galaxy?
This galaxy, M31, is often imaged by planet Earth-based astronomers.
As the nearest large spiral galaxy, it is a familiar sight
with dark dust lanes, bright yellowish core, and
spiral arms traced
by clouds of bright blue stars.
A mosaic of well-exposed broad and narrow-band image data,
this colorful portrait of our
neighboring island universe
offers strikingly unfamiliar
features though, faint reddish clouds of glowing
ionized hydrogen gas in the same wide field of view.
These ionized hydrogen clouds surely
lie in the foreground of the scene, well within our
Milky Way Galaxy.
They are likely associated with the pervasive, dusty
interstellar cirrus
clouds scattered hundreds of light-years above our own galactic plane.