APOD 3.7

This photo almost looks surreal! Well, this is actually happening in space. What you see here is star cluster called the Pleiades, which is located in the constellation Taurus, the bull. The icy blue thing that you see surrounding the star cluster is a gas and dust cloud. This dust cloud is from a ring of young star formation part of Gould's belt.

Okay here is a little background information. The Gould's Belt is a collection of big bright stars that form a ring on the sky. So no, there is not a constellation named Gould with a belt named after it (that would be like the constellation Orion).  This ring is more then 2000 light years long but no one really knows how it happened. This belt also includes the stars in Orion, Canis Major, and including our very own Sun!

Now part of the belt, over the past 100,000 have been moving right through the Pleiades which is causing a strong reaction between the stars and the dust. The pressure of the stars are repelling the dust into the blue reflection nebula, which are just clouds of dust that reflect the light of the stars. It's amazing how something so intense can make something to pretty. It just makes you wonder, what else is out there that we have yet to see...