There’s only one pic accompanying this piece (click photo above to enlarge), one released by NASA a couple of days ago. It shows something people who look at space for a living call the open star cluster NGC 330, in the Small Magellanic Cloud, at a distance so great it takes light, which moves at 186,282 miles per second (299,792 km per second), 180,000 years to reach us.
And it shows stars lit up in red, white and blue (and, granted, some yellowish-orange), as if space was giving the good old U.S. of A a big nod.
The image was captured by the aging but still capable Hubble Space Telescope and contains an impossible-to-count number of stars. According to NASA, the stars in this cluster, like all stars in all other clusters, are roughly the same age, making them useful for people who are trying to figure out how stars form and evolve.
The image was captured with Hubble’s “Field Camera 3 and incorporates data from two very different astronomical investigations.” It shows some of the stars with crisscross patterns around them, a phenomenon, called diffraction spikes, which is the result of starlight interacting “with the four thin vanes supporting Hubble’s secondary mirror.”
As for the colors of each of the stars, it all boils down to temperature. Cooler ones appear red, while warmer ones white or yellow. Really hot ones show up as blue.