IC 349 The Ghost of Merope

When I photographed the open star cluster Pleiades (M45) back in September, near the village of Verkh-Irmen in the Novosibirsk region, I managed to capture at least a bit of the rather challenging Merope Nebula (Ghost of Merope). This cold dust nebula is located just 0.06 light-years from the bright star Merope, or about 3,500 times the distance from Earth to the Sun. The strong stream of particles—the "stellar wind"—from the star is blowing the dust farther out into space. The small photo on the lower left shows how it appears as seen by the famous Hubble Space Telescope. It was separated from the overall dust nebula using StarNet.