Celestial Conception On a clear winter night, one can see a beautiful constellation of Auriga. A decent amateur telescope reveals a pair of sperm cell-like objects called Simeis-129 and -130 lurking in the clouds of ionized gas and stellar dust of the emission nebula IC410. The objects are approximately ten light-years long and about 12,000 light-years away from us. Their elongated shapes are due to the solar wind blowing matter from one of the stars at the center of the nebula. Inside the globular “heads” of Simeises reside stellar nurseries – hot and dense regions where new stars are born. Imaging the two Simeises took a total of 14 hours 20 minutes over a period of one month using a small refractor telescope in my front yard. Several weeks of data processing followed. As a result, we see Simeises “floating” through the delicate folds and fibers of gently glowing interstellar gas and dark cold dust clouds.
