Horsehead Nebula

This is what the Horsehead Nebula looked like, 1,500 years ago (from last weekend).

I wonder what it looks like now?

Imagine there were habitable planets around any of these stars with intelligent species with the capability to look into the stars.   If they looked at the third planet from our star and saw our ancestors from 1,500 years ago, what would they think of us?

The Mayans were doing well for themselves but brutal sacrifice and inequality were a cultural norm.

The people of Constantinople would be rioting about now, the result of a blockade by a Byzantine General, Vitalian.

Christendom is at war with Islam and in some smaller clashes, at war with itself.   The formerly Roman provinces of Britain begins to be divided among Anglo-Saxon Warlords in the beginnings of their Feudal Periods.

If the inhabitants of a planet, circling a star within the Horsehead Nebula could see us from their world, they would have seen Human Sacrifice, War, Famine and conquests driven by religious ideology. 

1,000 years before the Renaissance, humans were even bigger assholes than we are today..  It wasn’t our finest hour.  

Still by this Period, Ancient India had gotten pretty good at Astronomy and early philosophers had started to figure some things out based on observation.    1000 years before Giordano Bruno, folks were still regarding the points of light in our sky with supernatural wonder.

I'm still learning the ropes and dealing with technical problems with my secondhand QHY imager.     This was made through 4 5 minute exposures with a manual filter wheel, Baader Planetarium 2" Filters.  I calibrated them with 3 dozen calibration frames of equal exposure.

At some point during the process, the temperature wasn't holding very well on the imager, so I started getting anomalous heat-related inconsistencies that I tried to smooth in Lightroom.