 Greetings and welcome to the Introduction to Astronomy! One of the things that I like to do in each of my introductory astronomy classes is to begin the class with the astronomy picture of the day. From the NASA website that is apod.nasa.gov.apod. At today's picture, for August 14th of 2023, it is titled the Ring Nebula from Web. So what do we see here? Here we have an image from the James Webb Space Telescope and we're looking at a popular planetary nebula known as the Ring Nebula, located in the northern sky in the constellation of Lyra. And it is a planetary nebula, has nothing to do with planets, but has to do with the end of a star much like our own sun. And what happens at the end of that is that the core compacts down to the central star there, which would be a white dwarf star, extremely hot, and the outer layers are expelled out into space. And we see those as the various different colors scattered around in the nebula around that central core. And you can see how it's detached itself, that there's a big gap now pretty much between the compact star at the center and all of the material much further out. Now the James Webb Space Telescope looks in the infrared. So this is a false color image looking at infrared light and bringing out some more detail that we have not really seen before. And we see these spikes of material. So these filaments stretching outward, which may be caused, thought to be caused by shadows. So shadows in the knots of the dense gas in the ring are then cast outward in these long filaments stretching outward. So that is sort of a recent discovery that we're trying to learn more about this. And as we get more and more information about planetary nebulae, we get to understand more about what our sun will eventually do in another six to seven billion years after it has gone through all of the later stages of its life. So something we have to look forward to here on Earth that eventually the sun will become large enough to engulf all of the inner solar system and then eventually those outer layers will become so tenuously held by the gravity of the sun that they will no longer remain stable and any instabilities will push them out into space. So that's what we're seeing here is this very short-lived end state stage of a star much like our own sun. And again that happens when the star has used up all of its fuel so it starts to collapse down and as the inner layers collapse down the outer layers expand outward and eventually again they're not held very strongly and eventually expel out into space. But this will only last a few tens of thousands of years before the material dissipates out into the interstellar medium and the white dwarf star cools enough that it is no longer energetic enough to excite the gases around it. So that was our picture of the day for August 14th of 2023. It was titled The Ring Nebula from Web. We'll be back again tomorrow for the next picture previewed to be Triple Iced Sky. So we'll see what that is about tomorrow. And until then have a great day everyone and I will see you in class.