Credit: NASA and The Hub­ble Her­itage Team (STScI/AURA)

Eerie, wispy clouds show near the star Merope in this image from NASA’s Hub­ble Space Tele­scope. And to me the neb­ula resem­bles a ghostly bat.

The neb­ula is called a reflec­tion neb­ula because it is only reflect­ing light from the star, sim­i­lar to shin­ing a flash­light in a dark room. The cloud is very close to Merope; about 3500 times the dis­tance from the Earth to the Sun. The cloud was first viewed in 1890 by Amer­i­can astronomer E.E. Barnard. It is called Barnard’s Merope Neb­ula, or IC 349.

Usu­ally, neb­ula around star clus­ters is part of the mate­r­ial from the star’s for­ma­tion. The Pleiades are sur­rounded by a hazy cloud that is drift­ing through the star clus­ter. Our wispy cloud near Merope is being destroyed by the strong solar wind com­ing from the star. Pres­sure from the starlight is slow­ing down the smaller par­ti­cles of dust in the cloud, sift­ing them out of the star cloud. Look at the edges of the clouds to see this sort­ing. The straight lines point­ing toward the star are heav­ier grains of dust that con­tinue toward the star. The lighter dust forms clumps toward the left.

Merope is part of the famil­iar Pleiades star clus­ter. Also known as the Seven Sis­ters from Greek mythol­ogy, the star clus­ter can be seen high over­head dur­ing the north­ern hemi­sphere win­ter. The clus­ter resem­bles a small dip­per and lies in the con­stel­la­tion of Tau­rus the Bull. The clus­ter is about 380 light-years from Earth and con­tains hun­dreds of stars but most observers can only see six of the stars.