APOD 2.8

It's been a while! To kick things back into gear, I have chosen a picture from December 24th for the last APOD of the first semester.

This is a picture of a bubble nebula named Sharpless 308. This huge sphere of gases like hydrogen was blown up the the bright star in the middle called a Wolf-Rayet star which is actually over 20 times the size and heat of the sun but with a very short life span. This is pre-supernova explosions causing this bubble to expand to over 60 light years in diameter. This nebula is 5200 light years away and is located near the Big Dog constellation. This has been around for about 70,000 years and is continuously growing and enveloping more and more stars and planets. I chose this because it is just so cool and unique to everything else I have seen in a while.