This 35th edition of Astronomy Pictures of the Fortnight is a little lighter on the fantastic images and a little heavier on the cool explanations. So you might enjoy clicking thru the gallery images below the slideshow and reading the extended explanations. But to make up for that, a “video”…
Given the vast distances in astronomy, even fast moving objects will not appear to change their appearance in a human lifetime. Stars remain where they are. Nebulas appear the same. Day after day. Year after year.
A recent spectacular exception to this, created from the Hubble Space Telescope images from 1994 to 2008, is this time lapse of a supersonic jet in the star forming Herbig Haro 47 region. HH47 is so close (1500 ly), and the jets of plasma so fast (150 km/s), we can see movement extending over 10,000 times the Earth-Sun distance shoot out from a forming star.