Beautiful to the Very End by NefariousDrO
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No AI - This artwork was created entirely by hand or with traditional digital tools.
Description
I've said before that I spend a great deal of time looking at pictures from Hubble, and a few of you have reminded me that there's other wonderful telescopes out there (Like Spitzer for example, thanks Geirla) that are doing some amazing discovering of their own. At any rate, one particularly interesting thing to me is the end of a star's life-cycle. Smaller, sun-like stars shed their outer layers and become white dwarfs, larger stars may end up in a super-nova. In either case, what should seem sad, because it's the death throes of a star, looks incredibly beautiful through the eyes of a telescope; provided you're at a nice safe distance from the radiation, of course!
I'm not sure if I should consider this a super-nova, or the shedding of the outer layers. I'm not sure it matters, truth be told. What I am happy about is that this looks about as nice as I'd wanted, and how can you ask for more than that?
This is actually taken from one of the earlier variants of my previous post, if you can believe that. It started out back on July 26, and sat around for a long time before I tried playing with it again today. It took 42 layers of clouds, stars, and filters, but the end result is pleasing to me. There's mostly photos of clouds, a few layers of the random-cloud filter, heavily altered stars from the "Glitterato" filter by Flaming Pear, and some lens-flares for good measure.
Enjoy, and thanks for taking a look!

Comments (12)
looking cool. lot of work with 42 layers.
Very cool! To me it looks more like birth than death - the layers of a nebula pealing away under pressure from starlight. Or there's both at the same time - shock from a supernova collapsing clouds into new stars.
Very fine work--and obviously you have taken the time to do it correctly.
As always with your space landscapes its AWESOME. One day we may get out there.
Wonderful, as usual! ;)
Space art at its best!
beau travail!
Fantastic realization of this cosmic event! This looks so real, like many of the photos from Hubble and other telescopes! Sounds like you put a ton of work into this - and it was worth every bit of it!
42 layers...yeah, that's about right...or maybe it's just the reference to 42. At any rate, that's a high number of layers and a lot of tweaking/creating, and it shows here. I love the realistic depth this image has; the mood is fantastic. I kinda see this as a supernova explosion, the early parts of it before the explosion expands, ages and bends into those intriguing hoops that forms an hourglass shape as supernova spew continues long after the initial popping of the cork, so to speak. Anyway, this is quite a gorgeous image! And yeah, the death throes of a star are quite marvelous to behold, and just think...all of the heavier elements spewed out will contribute to the formation of life...somewhere...way off in the future, well one could hope anyway. This is great, and yeah, I love it.
Mind blowing GOOD!!! David
This is a very beautiful and very nice!
Awesome!!!