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Oh, if only this object were visible to us in our backyards!    Located in the constellation of Sagittarius, this nebula would regard us all malevolently:  the remote menace appearing as a minuscule orb of fire describing a low arc along the southern summer sky.      Of course, being 10,000 light years from Earth, it isn't visible without a telescope. Moreover, the fearsome features seen in the image above are rendered visible only by sophisticated astrophotography.  Even if we could observe this nebula from our own backyards, it would appear white and diffuse, as our eyes are not designed to distinguish colors at low light levels.   Still, we can dream....

The Eye of Sauron Nebula, otherwise known as M1-42 to the astronomical bookkeepers, is a planetary nebula that bears an eerie resemblance to the notorious necromancer's eye in the "Lord of the Rings" novels.    These nebulae are the death throes of solar mass stars that cast away their outer layers once their core nuclear reactions cease.   They are so named because they resemble planets when viewed telescopically.    These nebulae leave a white dwarf core in their centers: these white dwarf stars are not active, but instead slowly wick away their heat through the painfully inefficient radiative cooling process.   Mutual repulsions of the electrons contained within prevent the dwarf from collapsing.  In the "Eye of Sauron" nebula we are seeing how our own Sun might appear when it perishes in a planetary nebula in about 6.5 billion years. 

Oh, if only this object were visible to....ok, we get it...

Here we're seeing the hyperactive center of the spiral galaxy NGC* 4151

Located 43 million light years from Earth (much farther away in the cosmic sea than the nebula),  NGC 4151 is one of the closest galaxies that harbors an actively growing black hole.  The "eye" and its surrounding region are likely areas of turbulence created by dynamical interactions between the black hole and nearby gases.

 The photo above is a composite image of the galaxy's center in multiple wavelengths.  The "blue" pupil is collected from data from the Chandra X-Ray observatory. The yellow fringes were captured by the Kapetyn telescope in La Palma and the encircling red structure was imaged by the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array, an array of radio telescopes in New Mexico.

This image is another example of how much the human eye doesn't perceive.  After all, the visible

part of the spectrum is a rather thin section: 0.0035% of the spectrum if it were measured linearly. Developing the capacity to observe the Universe along other regions of the EM spectrum  has revealed a cosmos more complex and wondrous than anything we could have ever beheld in the