The Merope Nebula: NGC 1435 (infrared view) | NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope

The Merope Nebula: NGC 1435 (infrared view) | NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope

The Merope Nebula (also known as Tempel's Nebula and NGC 1435) is a diffuse reflection nebula in the Pleiades star cluster, surrounding the 4th magnitude star Merope. The nebula surrounds the star Merope (23 Tauri), after which it gets its name. Merope is a blue-white subgiant 630 times more luminous than our Sun. It is also more than four times larger and has a mass about 4.5 times solar. It lies at an approximate distance of 360 light years (110 parsecs) from Earth. It was discovered on October 19, 1859 by the German astronomer Wilhelm Tempel. 

The Spitzer Space Telescope (formerly SIRTF, the Space Infrared Telescope Facility) was launched by a Delta rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida on August 25, 2003. Consisting of a 0.85-meter telescope and three cryogenically-cooled science instruments, Spitzer was the largest infrared space telescope before the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was launched in December 2021. The telescope was named in honor of American astronomer, Lyman Spitzer, who had promoted the concept of space telescopes in the 1940s. The retired Spitzer was the first observatory to provide high-resolution images of the near- and mid-infrared Universe. Webb, by virtue of its significantly larger primary mirror and improved detectors, allows us to see the infrared sky with improved clarity (better spatial resolution), enabling even more discoveries.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, managed the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate (SMD). Science operations were conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at Caltech. Spacecraft operations were based at Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company, Littleton, Colorado. Data are archived at the Infrared Science Archive housed at Caltech/IPAC. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/J. Stauffer (SSC-Caltech)

Image Date: April 12, 2007

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