Absolutely incredible.
For a little bit of context for how impressive this is, here's my take on it with a consumer grade 8" Newtonian telescope from my backyard: https://www.astrobin.com/full/w4tjwt/0/
Your picture is itself quite impressive. Do you mind sharing more about the equipment and process it takes to capture something like that?
Edit: Oh, you can click through the image and see technical details. Very cool.
You already noticed the technical card [1], but I can describe some of the details that go into this for those unfamiliar with the items on it.
1. The scope they used is roughly equivalent to shooting with an 800mm telephoto lens. But the fact that it's 8" wide means it can let in a lot of light.
2. The camera [2] is a cooled monochrome camera. Sensor heat is a major source of noise, so the idea is to cool the sensor to -10deg (C) to reduce that noise. Shooting in mono allows you shoot each color channel separately, with filters that correspond to the precise wavelengths of light that are dominant in the object you're shooting and ideally minimize wavelengths present in light pollution or the moon. Monochrome also allows you to make use of the full sensor rather than splitting the light up between each channel. These cameras also have other favorable low-light noise properties, like large pixels and deep wells.
3. The mount is an EQ6-R pro (same mount I use!) and this is effectively a tripod that rotates counter to the Earth's spin. Without this, stars would look like curved streaks across the image. Combined with other aspects of the setup, the mount can also point the camera to a specific spot in the sky and keep the object in frame very precisely.
4. The set of filters they used are interesting! Typically, people shoot with RGB (for things like galaxies that use the full spectrum of visible light) or HSO (very narrow slices of the red, yellow, and blue parts of the visible spectrum, better for nebulas composed of gas emitting and reflecting light at specific wavelengths). The image was shot with a combination: a 3nm H-Alpha filter captures that red dusty nebulosity in the image and, for a target like the horsehead nebula, has a really high signal-to-noise ratio. The RGB filters were presumably for the star colors and to incorporate the blue from Alnitak into the image. The processing here was really tasteful in my opinion. It says this was shot from a Bortle-7 location, so that ultra narrow 3nm filter is cutting out a significant amount of light pollution. These are impressive results for such a bright location.
5. They most likely used a secondary camera whose sole purpose is to guide the mount and keep it pointed at the target object. The basic idea is try to put the center of some small star into some pixel. If during a frame that star moves a pixel to the right, it'll send an instruction to the mount to compensate and put it back to its original pixel. The guide camera isn't on the technical card, but they're using PHD2 software for guiding which basically necessitates that. The guide camera could have its own scope, or be integrated into the main scope by stealing a little bit of the light using a prism.
6. Lastly, it looks like most of the editing was done using Pixinsight. This allows each filter to be assigned to various color channels, alignment and averaging of the 93 exposures shot over 10 hours across 3 nights, subtraction of the sensor noise pattern using dark frames, removal of dust/scratches/imperfections from flat frames, and whatever other edits to reduce gradients/noise and color calibration that went into creating the final image.
[1] https://www.astrobin.com/w4tjwt/0/
[2] https://astronomy-imaging-camera.com/product/asi294mm-pro/
Thanks! I hadn't gotten to writing this out, but you've pretty much nailed it.
> They most likely used a secondary camera whose sole purpose is to guide the mount and keep it pointed at the target object.
I did use a guide camera with an off-axis guider, I'm not sure why it wasn't in the equipment list. I've added it.
> The RGB filters were presumably for the star colors and to incorporate the blue from Alnitak into the image.
This is primarily an RGB image, so the RGB filters were used for more than the star colors. This is a proper true color image. I could get away with doing that from my location because this target is so bright. The HA filter was used as a luminance/detail layer. That gave me a bunch of detail that my local light pollution would hide, and let me pick up on that really wispy stuff in the upper right :)
> The processing here was really tasteful in my opinion.
Awe shucks, thanks :blush:
One of my favorite comments ever on HN. Iām big into photography and yet learned something on nearly every bullet. Thank you!
Now I need to know the ballpark cost of this whole setup, so it will block me from trying to get into yet another very costly hobby.
EDIT: oh, just saw it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40206558
You packed so much knowledge in your brief response! Thank you!
"Do you mind sharing more about the equipment and process"
I'm sorry, but this is making me laugh so hard. I don't know a lot about astrophotography, but one thing I've experienced so far is that astrophotographers love to talk about their equipment and process.
It's like asking a grandparent, "Oh, do you have pictures of your grandkids?" It kind of makes their day. :)
Haha, yeah. I could go on for hours. I've had to learn that most people really don't want a lecture series on the finer points of astrophotography. Seabass's comment was pretty much perfect; a bit of detail, but not so much to get lost in the detail.
I tried to write a quick comment on my process a couple of times before they posted, and each time I had way too many words on a small detail.
Amazing shot! Lots of good stuff, really liked this full moon shot https://www.astrobin.com/w0lzn5/B/ - the color!
Here is my Esprit 120mm widefield version https://www.astrobin.com/full/r97r5j/0/
Oh nice! Except for Alnitak (I love me some spikes), I like yours more.
Thatās super cool!!! Looks like quite a niche/technical hobby with amazing output. Do you mind sharing how much equipment costs to get similar results?
It's a wonderful niche/technical hobby, but it's not cheap. You could even say it's "pay to win". I didn't buy all of my stuff at once, and I had some mistakes, but I'd guess I use on the order of $10k in equipment.
Just to follow on, you can gets started with quite a bit less. My dad took a stab at some basic shots with his prosumer Nikon and a basic tracking tripod.
That's still $1000 body, $1000 glass, $500 tripod, give or take. So far from cheap if you're starting from scratch. But if you already have a body and some glass, it's not a stretch. Or, if you're ok with hunting for used gear, the body and glass can be ~half off new retail.
Wow. The NIRCam image is probably going to be the most exciting new photo, but I can't get over how well MIRI reveals the internal structure of the nebula.
NIRCam: https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2024/04/Horsehead_...
MIRI: https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2024/04/Horsehead_...
Comparison: https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2024/04/Slider_Too...
And when 'zooming in' and seeing the top 2/3 of the photo (https://www.esa.int/var/esa/storage/images/esa_multimedia/im...) I am super amazed that all these small discs showing are galaxies. GALAXIES (sorry for the caps).
How tiny are we (Humans, Earth, Solar system)... less than a speck of dust in the Sahara.
I used to look up in space when I was growing up and there wasn't any light pollution to the small town I was growing up in. At some point I think I started suffering from 'cosmic horror'. In later years I would pay attention only to the moon, and that reduced my stress significantly.
Nowadays (like in this bit of news, with photos) when I stick to the small photo in an article, I feel ok. When I see it in full size and I zoom in, and I realize that "sh*t! these 5-10-50 tiny white marks are GALAXIES.. and I have to change topics/tabs to keep the cosmic horror at bay.
Interesting. I've also always had a visceral response to particularly clear night skies - but it's only ever been a profoundly positive feeling. It kind of erases the idea that my "problems" have any significance at all.
The loss of dark skies is so painful, maybe the worst thing modern life brought to us. I remember laying in the grass with my grandma looking at the stars for hours, she would tell me how the whole village gathered around the only TV they had to watch the moon landing live, about sputnik, galaxies, satellites, &c. there aren't many things as mesmerising, maybe watching a fire or the ocean waves, but it doesn't trigger the same emotions in me.
I don't travel much but when I go to remote areas star gazing is up there on my list of things to do; watch the stars until you're about to pass out from hypothermia, go back inside, make some tea, enjoy the fireplace, forget about the daily (non) problems, it never gets old
Experience that all the time with the same imagery, with the same amazement / horror combination.
What's more amazing is when you share this fact to most people "did you know each dot here is a GALAXY, not a star!" they go "heh... interesting" and shrug.
For some reason that makes the whole thing even crazier to me
I think it just doesn't really click for people most of the time. Eg for my mom no amount of showing science pics and explaining the scale of the distances conveyed things, it only really clicked when Jupiter became visible in the night sky as a particularly bright and large point of light which caught her interest, and when we moved to somewhere dark enough that the galactic plane was faintly noticeable.
Cosmic horror is a good one. I've only seen the Milky Way with my own eyes a couple of times and the last time gave me an existential cosmic horror too.
I went to sleep thinking about the unignitable size and age of what's all around us in every direction, but particularly that I had just looked at our own galaxy... a galaxy that has been there for billions of years, has always been there my entire and is there right now and there's only this tiny invisible thin bit of atmosphere separating us from it.
Then I thought about the fact tha our solar system is orbiting it right now, and we're orbiting the sun on an invisible track, and the moon orbits us on its own invisible track too.
That's quite a lot to deal with when you only woke up for a pee in the middle of a night in a camping holiday in Wales.
I kinda had an out-of-body experience when watching the Kurzgesagt video on The Largest Black Hole in the Universe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FH9cgRhQ-k
Watching the zoom-out to picture ultra-massive black holes is surreal.
Crazy how many galaxies are in that one photo (in the background).
Number of stars in the Milky Way: 100 billion
Number of galaxies in the universe: 200 billion to 2,000 billion
Is 2,000 billion some theoretical limit or something else? Thanks.
*observable universe
100 billion is the low end estimate for our galaxy.
400 billion is the high end.
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A few years ago, I calculated that there are approximately one Mole (6e23) of stars in the visible universe. That was a fun result.
We are probably looking at galaxies when we look at some stars and have no idea how many turtles deep things go.
I love that there are multiple sensors that can be compared to like this, but also love when the optical images from Hubble are compared as well.
The images that combine all of the frequencies from Chandra X-rays, Hubble's optical, and now Webb's IR make for some truly fascinating images.
Is this image of what the eye would see or is it modified?
The JWST, as is well known, is a near and mid infrared telescope, its range (600 to 2850 nm) overlapping with human vision only a little bit in the deep red. So every single JWST image is necessarily in false color.
The youtube link to a 'zoom' in video to the image:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkVprNB5XbI
What is really, really neat to notice isn't just the detail in that final image.... look behind it, and there are whole edge-on spiral galaxies in the distance. Not stars. Galaxies.
The nebula is about 1375 light years away. Those galaxies in the distance.... are billions of light years away. It's hard to comprehend.
> look behind it, and there are whole edge-on spiral galaxies in the distance. Not stars. Galaxies.
just to add to the awe of that, pretty much every "dot" in one of these images is going to be another galaxy. individual stars from within the Milky Way will have diffraction spikes and very obvious as a single item.
It's dizzying even on the galactic scale to internalize that discrete, visible stars are "right there" compared to the general murkiness of the Milky Way. A sphere of very near stars right next to us relatively speaking
There really is a lot of stuff left to see for the first time
"A lot" is the number of fish in a swarm maybe.
This is so far away from our concept of counting things that the mind just gives up. There's no comparison, no dumbing down to X amount of football fields, just nothing.
I find it depressing, confusing but also inspiring and fascinating at the same time.
Yes, there is so much we canāt possibly know or experience in our lifetimes, perhaps in the span of time our species will exist, to the extent that it becomes easy to imagine ourselves more like bacteria on a speck of dust floating in the air rather than on any scale towards the inverse. Weāre incredibly small in size and mental capacity.
In ways the bacteria on the dust are oblivious to the scale and nature of the world around them, we seem similarly lost and hopeless in the pursuit of comprehending the universe. We just werenāt built to grasp this kind of scale. We can enjoy images of the tiniest little slices of it, though. Iām actually very grateful for that. I think itāll be a source of endless wonder for my entire life.
I heard comparisons of the number of stars in the observable universe to the number of all grains of sand on Earth's beaches, or the number of molecules in a bottle of air. Not sure if that helps anyone, though.
That feeling of awe, if that could be shared with most people on earth - perhaps they wouldn't waste their pity lives fighting each other.
I found this mesmerizing. Particularly fun is to scrub forward and backward through the video to clarify where exactly you're looking. (I found it worked better on the embedded video in the article than the yt one, not sure why)
There's also a zoom on the image on ESA - https://esawebb.org/images/weic2411a/
The zoomable version: https://esawebb.org/images/weic2411a/zoomable/
That's an incredibly detailed image.
Every single time I see one of these amazing space pics, it's hard not to get all philosophical and wonder about the size of space & time on cosmic scale, how small our earth is and how insignificant our regular problems are.
I don't care if I don't get to see flying cars or AGI in my lifetime but I will be very disappointed if our knowledge of space remains more or less the same as today without much progress.
Edit: typo
We are lucky that we live in a sweet-spot era where the universe is old enough that we have 13 billion years to look back on, but young enough that all the galaxies havenāt receded behind the cosmic horizon yet due to the accelerated expansion of the universe. In some billion years, intelligent beings will only have historic records, if anything at all, to look back to how the observable universe used to be filled with billions of galaxies.
What if the only place where intelligent life was ever possible in the universe is being actively made impossible to live in by intelligent beings, which means after they're gone extinct, there'll be no intelligent beings to appreciate its beauty?
That seems a quite likely outcome to me. On the positive side, once it happens, there will be no one who would mourn it.
Buddhism is deeply rooted in reincarnation and the progression of a common person to an enlightened being through different ranks over the span of multiple lifetimes.
I am pretty sure there is a dimension of life that we have yet to discover and learn about. And for the time being Buddhism is the only āreligionā that openly discusses this progression.
Hinduism has the same but in my experience itās a lot more reserved. Bali is a great example of this (which has a strong Hinduism foundation), of how you can create āparadise on Earthā and yet 99.99% of touristās donāt ever encounter the root of that paradise.
Humans will learn the full extent of life long before they go extinct.
Life will survive beyond humanity, trust me. Intelligence already exists in a few animals on this planet, and another few million years could have them at the top of the food chain, exploring our relics.
I don't understand people that aren't filled with dread with this concept.
And I understand why so many humans fall back to something like religion to cope. It's the only way it seems to become complacent with our role in the cosmic horror.
I know all the intellectual arguments for optimistic nihilism. I vote in elections even though my "one vote" doesn't matter amongst millions, and in some degree my single human life is the same on a timescale of (hopefully) trillions of humans by the time we get to the point of worrying about the receding observable universe.
And yet...
The change is too slow for anyone to be personally affected by it. Besides, the universe as such is devoid of any meaning; meaning is only something that we create internally. The fact that we dread voids and emptiness is also a result of evolutionary needs, there is no ādreadā outside of us.
Considering that I used to experience that dread, and how I used to think, and the patterns I see in your speech -- I'd say that dread is not a response to the concept, but due to over intellectualizing.
The dread is precisely the intellect recoiling at its limits. It reaches for other intellectual theories to rescue it but this is of course in vain.
The way out is to seek answers in other complimentary areas and ways of seeing the world.
People create various stories just to escape concept of void. But if one does not seek those lies, there is no need for nihilism. Because even if our consciousness was not relevant - it is only thing we have. It is relevant to us. It is us till we meet the void.
> it's hard not to get all philisophical and wonder about the size of space & time on cosmic scale
Indeed!
Never a bad time to re-watch Cosmos and (in my opinion) the awesome sequel(s) by Neil de Grasse Tyson. Is it weird to admit I even choke up during some of the episodes?
(As an aside, why is it so hard to find the sequels to Cosmos in any streaming service. In my country it's not on Netflix, Disney+, Apple, HBO/Max, Star+, Prime Video. What the hell...? I just want to re-watch the damned thing and I don't own a Blu-ray player. Do I have to pirate the stuff?)
It should be one of the things that Disney owns outright today (from having bought some but not all of Fox/News Corp), so Disney+ is the natural home, but that version of Cosmos was a very expensive show so between the "Disney Vault" and Disney again remembering they can get revenue from lending shows to other services it does seem to be off Disney+ for the moment.
JustWatch says it is streaming on ad-supported Free service Tubi in the US right now: https://www.justwatch.com/us/tv-show/cosmos-a-spacetime-odys...
(JustWatch is a too useful service at this point in the Streaming Wars to figure out where shows and movies currently are. I am getting to point of buying more Blu-Rays again, though, because there are too many services and many of the ad-supported ones like Tubi and Pluto are sometimes really obnoxious, and some of the paid services I have strong reasons I don't want to pay for them. I certainly have friends that have gone back to piracy, and it does sound more tempting as the Streaming Wars get worse.)
Thanks, JustWatch is indeed very useful!
I'm not in the US so Tubi doesn't work for me. Apparently none of the Cosmos series (original or the two sequels) is available in my country. Not even to buy.
I'm so thrilled! I cannot wait to NOT watch this anywhere legally!
Oh well, to the Bay it is.
You gave it a fair shot, go ahead and come join us at the bay where the grass is green, the videos full HD and nobody wants your money (just your soul).
We wanted Spotify for video, we got Netflix, Disney+, Apple, HBO/Max, Star+, Prime Video, and your local thing too. And they still havenāt got what you want to watch. /sigh
Neil de Grasse Tyson is still on my 'to watch' list, but you may be interested in Brian Cox's 'Wonders of the Solar System / Universe' series. From what I've heard, Brian Cox is something of the British equivalent of Tyson. 'Wonders-' is a beautifully shot series that is both educational and remains impressive over a decade on (2010-2011).
The only thing that might be disappointing if you're already into astrophysics is that it's rather dumbed-down compared to his books, which are more earnest, closer perhaps in style to Feynman's Lectures.
I really like Brian Cox, but I do really wish he'd aim his content a bit higher and pack a bit more information into it. I hesitate to use "dumbed down" though (maybe I would if I didn't like him so much), more like it's just a bit too laid back and slow like it's aimed at people not really paying attention.
Wow, never even heard of Brian Cox! Will find this series you mention. Thanks for the recommendation.
I'm not a physicist of any kind so I'm ok at the "science divulgation" level.
We're probably not getting to space without AGI or at least some level of sophisticated AI. At a certain point our biological bodies are just wed to the Earth and its ecosystem, as we are animals that are products of the Earth.
If "we" ever get out there, some form of mechanical AI will. And we will never know it because once we send those ships off, we'll be long gone before the return signal gets to us from some far of locale. Imagine a voyager who can self-repair, mine asteroids, print circuits, etc. Now imagine giving it a 1 million year mission. Maybe by then we'll all have given up on biology and we'd be the "robots" on that ship.
Sometimes the universe makes beings like us, but not often, and probably makes all manner of interesting beings that will most likely be forever out of reach, and us out of their reach. Kudos to some life on a faraway planet, I wish we could meet.
Also its fun to think of the universe as a system. Here's this incomprehensibly large thing constantly in motion, constantly having stars die out and explode, and new ones born, etc all the time but to us at incredible slow speeds, everywhere, yet at incredible distances from each other. Its like this bellows that keeps a fire lit, over and over, non-stop. But not quite non-stop because this great furnace too will (probably) have a proper death. This universe life cycle chart is both a feat of science and an incredible work of a permanent and grim mortality of all things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_timeline_from_Big_Ba...
That always makes me want to ditch whatever I'm doing and switching gear to hiking, coding and studying Mathematics and Physics.
Bitter realization at the end, of course.
I am reminded of Davidās song in Psalm 19 ā¦ Itās amazing to me how in the thousands of years since he wrote these words, weāve still only scratched the surface of observing the beauty and depth of creation.
The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge. They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them. Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.
Beautiful catch! Iām always amazed by the Bibleās timelessness. Even when I know to expect it, it still impresses me.
It's so very unlikely that there aren't millions of other lifeforms out there.
Sometimes I think that life could well have been just my soul and no one else, but here I am sharing this world with billions of other people, trillions of other lifeforms on this planet alone. So it is possible that more than one lifeform exists, that they share this universe and communicate in it. Why shouldn't this also be possible on millions of other earth-like planets out there?
Of course there are other lifeforms out there, it's statistically implausible for it to be otherwise. What's also implausible is that, given the impossible vastness and hostility of interstellar space, that any will ever manage to contact us, specifically. Fortunately, we've got lots of crazy lifeforms here on Earth to keep us occupied, if we can take a moment to stop extincting them as fast as we possibly can.
> Of course there are other lifeforms out there, it's statistically implausible for it to be otherwise.
I'll grant you that once we have found a single other planet with life. Until then we're doing statistics on a single data point and no, the number of planets and galaxies etc are not sufficient to statistically determine the prevalence of life because as yet none of them are confirmed to have life. This is wishful thinking and statistical truthiness.
This is only true if we believe Earth is special, which we have no bases. So I'll stick to statistics for now, thank you very much.
I do think thereās other life out there. But just considering the other side, the statistical model only applies if the existence of life is actually stochastic.
If a farmer plants a single tree in the middle of a square mile plot and rips up anything else that grows, any Fermi approximations done by the tree are going to be quite misleading.
Who's this galactic farmer you're talking about?
First of all: the question needs to be qualified by what we mean by "out there". The galaxy? The observable universe? The entire universe?
The universe might be infinite, in which case: yes, there is life out there. We know the probably of life forming on any given planet must be greater than zero, or else we wouldn't be here. From this we can deduce the average volume which contains exactly one planet with life, which must be finite. Whether it makes sense to talk about what could be happening beyond the cosmological event horizon is another discussion.
If we are talking about the observable universe or an even smaller volume: How can you say it's statistically implausible without knowing the probability of life forming on any given planet? It might be incredibly small, yet greater than zero. Your line of reasoning is incredibly common but I can't help but feel like it's mainly driven by wishful thinking.
Probably extrapolating from the fact that life here on Earth being found in harsh conditions, and those conditions being likely to be found all over the universe.
"Dissolving the Fermi Paradox"
>that they share this universe and communicate in it. Why shouldn't this also be possible on millions of other earth-like planets out there?
one trivial but powerful observation that von Neumann made was that our galaxy say, is actually pretty small. It's about 100k light years big, which means that any civilization spreading at only a tiny fraction of the speed of light could expand through the entire milky way in only a million years. We could very well spread through the entire galaxy in the near future if we manage to get to like, 1% of light speed in the next few hundred years.
So our galaxy, which contains a few hundred billion stars almost certainly has no other intelligent life in it for the simple reason that it'd be everywhere. That doesn't mean there's no microbial life or maybe technological life billions of light years out there but the fact that we're so alone in our neighborhood is a pretty strong indicator in the direction that advanced life might be much more rare than some people assume.
> So our galaxy, which contains a few hundred billion stars almost certainly has no other intelligent life in it for the simple reason that it'd be everywhere.
By that account another civilisation as advanced as us would say they're equally alone in the galaxy no ? yet here we are. And you forget time, they might have done that 2b years ago and there is nothing left for us to detect, or they might do it in 2b years and we might not be there to witness it. Also there might be barriers we're not aware of, for example advanced civilisations could go through things like extinction through pollution, over consumption of resources before reaching a tipping point to being multi planetary, &c.
Plus we're far from the only galaxy, there might be galaxy wide civilisations out there, far far away. And more important, nothing guarantees the premise of multi-planetary civilisation has any validity outside of sci-fi
It's like going in the woods twice a year, not seeing mushrooms and concluding mushrooms don't exist on earth because surely you'd have seen them by now! The bottom line is that we just have absolutely no clue
I don't think this is a good indication.
Assuming that von Neumann was right, and assuming it's even technologically possible to achieve 1% of light speed, here's some alternative explanations of why we don't see aliens in the Milky Way:
- Maybe we're ahead of the race here. It's unlikely, but it has to be the truth for some intelligent lifeform. Why not us? I admit this is unlikely.
- Maybe galaxy exploration is technically feasible but economically unfeasible. Aliens would have to solve the same problems than us.
- Maybe galaxy exploration is technically and economically feasible, but the overwhelming majority of lifeforms go extinct before reaching this point, an none have been able so far (additional assumption: life is relatively new in the universe, much like it's relatively new on Earth itself).
- Maybe galaxy exploration is possible and evidence of life forms has reached us, but we didn't understand them because we weren't looking for the right things.
- Maybe galaxy exploration is possible and aliens want us to remain untouched and unaware, much like some wish would happen with lost Amazonian tribes (only the aliens would be more successful).
Or we are as ignorant about the aliens as ants are about us.
Each galaxy is a neuron and we are a spec of electricity within a spec of a neuron experiencing ourself, the universe, in realtime, together, forever
Strong evidence for a race of horse-headed aliens.
The zoom-in video at the end is utterly unbelievable, don't miss it. What an engineering and scientific triumph.
And it's in glorious 432p resolution!
Edit: Here is the 2160p version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdHnF9Go_DQ
Particularly if you notice all the galaxies above the top of the gas cloud in the final frame.
I wonder how fast an observer would need to be traveling for it to look like that!
99.x% the speed of light, but the image would be blueshifted and highly distorted.
Since the images in the article are from infrared cameras, blue-shifting the light might just land the view from those IR images into the visible spectrum for the observer! Just need to tune the speed correctly.
For a sense of scale, the Horsehead Nebula has a diameter of 7 light years which is greater than the distance of 4 light years from us to Proxima Centauri.
From Wikipedia: Most nebulae are of vast size; some are hundreds of light-years in diameter.
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