APOD 3.7

This picture, "M78 and Reflecting Dust Clouds in Orion" truly boggles my mind when I look at it. Rather than a picture of astronomical realm, this picture appears to be a battlefield with bombs blowing up and smoke grenades everywhere, to be perfectly honest. I must conclude, that with such glowing color, and incredible detail and texture, that a bit of editing and false color has been added to this particular picture. Nonetheless the picture is very interesting, despite its aesthetic upgrades. It deals with a few things, two of which I am familiar with and the others which I am not. We have studied in our class, Orion and M78 over the weeks, so it is always nice to find Apods on familiar subjects. However I have no knowledge of reflection nebulae, which are apparently quite abundant in this picture. Perhaps it is, that M78 is in fact a reflection nebulae, and I was just unaware of this fact all along! Regardless, I also learned another cool thing about M78 while perusing the embedded links. M78 is actually belongs to the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex, and is so incredibly far away, that the image we see is 1600 years old, due to the travel time of light! This is a positively insane concept to think about, and is just incredible to contemplate, that distances that we are dealing with in space.