Hi, I'm Shannon Silverman, astrophysicist at the Clay Center.

And welcome to Almost Heavens.

Here in West Virginia, we're just about halfway between the North Pole and the equator.

That means we are in the perfect spot to view everything the northern skies have to offer, and even a little of the southern skies too.

Stars, planets and the moon aren't the only things to be seen in the night sky.

Other features, which range from galaxies to nebulas to star clusters and beyond, are generall referred to as deep sky objects.

In the fall, there are several beautiful deep sky objects to be found, including two particularly striking nebula of completely different types.

Let's start with the first M 57, the Ring Nebula.

The Ring Nebula is something called a planetary nebula, but unfortunately this name is very misleading in that this type of nebul has nothing to do with planets.

It was named that way because upon discovery in the late 1700s, it looked like a fuzzy round object, much like a planet.

However, we later discovered that planetary nebulae are actually formed by stars.

In this case, a star likely a little more massive than our sun, reache the end of its life and cast off its outer layers to leave only the core behind.

The core.

A white dwarf star continued releasing energy, blowing the layers of star material away like an expanding bubble leading to the beautiful ring nebula we see today.

You can find the Ring Nebula in the constellation Lyra, which is easy to spot as its brightest star is Vega, the second brightest star of the Northern hemisphere.

The Ring Nebula is almost exactly halfway between Sheliak and Sulafat, and the ring shape of it can be seen with a mid-range hobbyist telescope.

The other nebula is much more difficult both to see and to find, but not because it's small.

It's huge.

Spanning about four times the size of the full moon, however, this makes it faint, and because it's so large, it can be tricky to view in a telescope.

But it's an excellent target to practice astrophotography.

The heart Nebula is made u of many different ionized gases, including hydrogen, oxygen, and sulfur.

These gases have been energize by the stars within the nebula, causing them to glow and illuminate the lopsided heart shap that this nebula is known for.

Unfortunately, not only is the Heart Nebula difficul to see, it's difficult to find.

It's near the constellation Cassiopeia.

On the left side, if you orient the W shape upright.

Now imagine the first line of the W, but instead of it going to the right, extend it to the left.

That'll get you to the right general area.

But this is definitely a cas where GPS will be a great help in finding this spectacular object.

Thank you for joining.

Keep an eye out for more almost heavens on our channel and our socials.

Until next time.