Traveling to the Heart

Thanksgiving’s around the corner, and it’s a time we think about love and the people who anchor us—so here’s a little cosmic heart to go with the earthly ones…my photo of the Heart Nebula, a cozy little cloud of gas and stars only 7,500 light-years away.

Need a sense of scale? Picture your car doing its usual 60 mph. Now picture duct-taping a warp core to the hood so it can suddenly go 186,000 miles per second. You peel out of the driveway, never stop for gas or a bathroom break, and keep going for an entire year.

Your odometer would roll over to 5.88 trillion miles—and your warranty would disintegrate somewhere around mile 3 trillion.

And if you were hoping to reach the Heart Nebula before the 27th,

unfortunately, you’d still have 44 trillion miles to go.