light from the heart

APOD featured the heart-shaped, star-forming region, W5, last year. viewed below is the infrared image captured by the spitzer space telescope. i cropped the image to show the heart portion of the "heart and soul nebula"!


this star-forming complex sits 6,500 light years away in the cassiopeia constellation. the processes of all the gas condensing down to give birth to new stars leads me (loosely) into the next valentine's day feature: jay grandin's inanimate love:



some lovely images and art:








and i'll end with a simple valentine... like the ones we used to sign and embarrassingly hand out to each other kid in our elementary classes on valentine's day:


(sitll - hard to beat last year's punny valentines)