2012 January 31
My main reason for selecting this article was to better remember the Helix Nebula in Aquarius' miscellaneous section in COTW quizzes; details about the nebula will prevent me from forgetting to write it in. Details like the Helix Nebula's being the closest planetary nebula to Earth or that it actually looks like a helix (who would have guessed)! The nebula was created when the original star ,that produced the nebula, exhausted its nuclear fuel and expelled its gases to create a planetary nebula. The Helix Nebula is destined to be a White Dwarf Star one day, but for today we know the nebula as the Eye of God that resides in space. The name was popularized on the Internet when a May 2003 APOD took of picture of the nebula that ended up looking like a giant eye. Even though NASA never referred to it as the Eye of God, many websites titled the image on their respective sites as the Eye of God. On May. 4th, 2008 another "eye" was discovered, Kohoutek 4-55 planetary nebula, located in the constellation Cygnus. The Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) at the European Southern Observatory's Paranal Observatory in Chile took the above image and the following image is the Kohoutek "eye" photograph.
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