Jan 18th, 2018 : Space Hazards

[xoxoxoBruce]

The official description from APOD.

With image data from telescopes large and small, this close-up features the dusty Elephant's Trunk Nebula. It winds through the emission nebula and young star cluster complex IC 1396, in the high and far off constellation of Cepheus. Also known as vdB 142, the cosmic elephant's trunk is over 20 light-years long. The colorful view highlights bright, swept-back ridges that outline the region's pockets of cool interstellar dust and gas. Such embedded, dark, tendril-shaped clouds contain the raw material for star formation and hide protostars within. Nearly 3,000 light-years distant, the relatively faint IC 1396 complex covers a large region on the sky, spanning over 5 degrees. This dramatic scene spans a 1 degree wide field, about the size of 2 Full Moons.

So think how difficult it would be to navigate through that mess.
Which raises the question, do we really need Disney making it worse?

[Flint]

So think how difficult it would be to navigate through that mess.

I'm not sure it would be. It looks like a mess, but 20 light-years is a lot of room to spread out in.

If you were in NASA'S Juno Mission spacecraft, the fastest man-made object, traveling at 25 miles per second, it would take 148,800 years to travel down the elephant's trunk. And if difficult space navigation took 1 full day to plan and execute, you would have time to make 54,312,000 course corrections--over the course of 1,488 100-year lifetimes.

In your lifetime, would you travel far enough (one 1500th of this image) for things to stop looking basically homogeneous? Or are those dark areas just packed solid with all that dust and gas--like, continuously turbulent?