A Sooty Cosmic Spider 

I'm always surprised when I find a picture of a nebula I've never heard of before, especially when it's big and splashy and very cool-looking, as well as scientifically really interesting. So I got a bit of a shock when I saw this image of IC 417, aka The Spider Nebula, on NASA's Instagram feed*: That image is in the infrared and is a combination of observations taken using the Two Micron All Sky Survey (shown in blue, representing a wavelength of 1.2 microns), and Spitzer Space Telescope (green...