Embryo Nebula Wide Field (NGC 1333, vdB 17)

This is a wide-field shot of NGC 1333 I took with my small refractor on a dark sky trip to Big Bend in 2020—not long after I first started doing astrophotography. It’s a bit of a bookend with the closeup I shot with the big reflector a couple of years later. It provides a bit more context than the close-in shot and begins to show how much dark brown molecular surrounds the area. It’s approximately 960 light years from Earth in the Perseus constellation.

It’s an extremely active star-forming area that is engulfed in a cold, dense molecular cloud—an excellent environment for creating new stars because it’s cold and dense, thus allowing matter to clump together and start attracting more material through gravitational attraction.

The area is packed with Herbig-Haro (HH) objects and young stellar objects (YSOs). Herbig-Haro objects are areas of bright nebulosity created by jets from newly formed stars. A YSO is an object that is producing internal nuclear fusion, but has not quite become a full-fledged star (that is, it has yet to arrive on what scientists call the main sequence).

The dark molecular clouds in the area are excellent locations for star formation because they tend to be colder and denser, thus allowing matter to clump together and start attracting more material through gravitational attraction.