Though the Milky Way and Andromeda formed billions of years ago, evidence shows they have very different evolutionary histories despite sharing the same cosmological neighbourhood.
The Horsehead Nebula is a small dark nebula in the constellation Orion. Resembling a horse’s head is located just to the south of Alnitak, the easternmost star of Orion’s Belt. Nearby, the Flame Nebula appears like its name in astrophotos.
Messier 67 is an ancient open cluster in the southern, equatorial half of Cancer. It was discovered by Johann Gottfried Koehler in 1779. It is a truly ancient cluster, with some astronomers calculating that it’s as old as five billion years!
The Quadrantid meteor shower kicks off the meteor-watching calendar, peaking this year on 3 January. Renowned for its reliability, it consistently ranks among the best annual meteor displays.