Mahna Mahna – Sh2-175, 177, and 179

When I saw this image take shape, my first thought was of this skit from the Muppets c. 1975:

But there’s a lot more going on here than my geezing sense of pareidolia. Sh2-175, the small bright dot in the upper right of the frame, is a small, multilobed emission nebula with active star-forming going on—primarily in the leftmost lobe.

The small nebula toward the upper-left of the frame is Sh2-179. Stewart Sharpless misidentified this object as an HII region and added it to his catalogue of those kinds of objects as the 179th entry. But it’s actually a planetary nebula catalogued as PK121+00.1 and also BV 5-2—so named after the astronomer Erika Böhm-Vitense, who discovered it in 1956.

Sh2-177 is a much larger emission region more toward the center of the frame and is the shape responsible for me thinking of Jim Henson and crew. Recent estimates place it at 6,500 light years from us.