# The Lion nebula

- By: Ram samudrala
- Date: 2023-12-15
- Classification: Photograph
- Museum: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Lion_nebula.jpg)
- Rights: [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)
- Picture: https://invisiblenetwork.ai/thumbs/commons/thumb/6/68/The_Lion_nebula.jpg/1920px-The_Lion_nebula.jpg
- Who can see it: Kids profiles and older (museums give no ratings; placed by Invisible Network from the museum's own words)

The Lion Nebula is an extended emission nebula in the constellation Cepheus. Its apparent distance is more than 10,000 light years away from Earth. While it fits nicely within the FOV of my 4" scope reduced to 490mm focal length, it is estimated to be about 250 light years across. (For reference, the diametre of our planet Earth is 0.0425 light seconds across!)

Multiple stars apparently worked in concert to create the Lion's distinctive shape, with at least two hot, massive, eruptive stars known as Wolf-Rayet identified, as well other bubbles/shells of outwardly exploding gases with stars in the centre discovered. Wolf-Rayet stars are bright, highly evolved, and at least twenty solar masses or greater, which is two followed by thirty zeroes, equivalent to ~334,000 times the size of Earth. It always boggles my mind to contemplate these distances, sizes, and masses, not to mention the cosmic dynamics and dancing that is occurring or has occurred.

In addition to its lion shape, there are dark nebulae within the "head" region as well as two large ones around the "tail" (B369|LDN1150/LDN1154) along with interstellar matter Ced203. A small cluster of stars in the "mouth" area, right…