@jalley
For some reason this looks like the most phenomenal POVRay rendering I've ever seen.
This could be on the cover of a book with a CD-ROM sleeve glued to the inside back flap with a disc of software for raytracing, viewing TARGA images, and a sampler of public domain images the publisher scraped from an FTP archive.
Stars removed for effect, perhaps showing the view from outside of our galaxy. 2.5 million light years away, M31 will collide and merge with the Milky Way in about 4.5 billion years.
William Optics 61mm Zenithstar OTA, ZWO183MC camera, Celestron CGEM mount. About 40x4min exposures.
#LookUp, my good people! The peak of the #Geminids meteor shower is tonight & tomorrow!
The Geminids are thought to originate from asteroid Phaethon: a weird beast that emits dust a bit like a comet. These dust bunnies then becomes the meteor shower.
JAXA's DESTINY+ mission is scheduled to launch in 2025 and fly past Phaethon to check it out at close quarters, and find out a bit more about its composition. It's possible dust from such "active asteroids" could have delivered organics to Earth.
Observations from the Spitzer Space Telescope have recently suggested that Phaethon might be the same type of space rock at CY chondrites: a very rare class of meteorite.
The "Y" in CY stands for "Yamato" mountains in Antarctica where Japanese geologists found the first Antarctica meteorite. Now, teams go out annually to hunt for falls as the icy conditions make these meteorites as pristine as you can get without doing sample return.