Astrophoto: Dusty Star Birth and Future Spectacular Death in the Swan

Judy Schmidt is a wonder. She's an amateur astronomer who loves to play with astronomical images from big observatories, and when she does, the results are, well, wondrous. Behold! That is an area of the sky in Cygnus, the constellation of the Swan (also called the Northern Cross), and shows a region called Cyg X, and I hadn't heard of it before seeing that glorious image. Cya X is a dense molecular cloud very roughly 3,000 to 4,000 light-years away. Molecular clouds are vast complexes of cold g...