
PK 164 +31.1: The Headphone Nebula
2026-05-27
What is a pair of headphones doing in the sky? Today’s image features the Headphone Nebula, also known as PK 164 +31.1 or Jones-Emberson 1. This planetary nebula, the remnant of a dying Sun-like star, faintly occupies an angular region of the Lynx constellation about 1/5th the diameter of the full moon. The red and blue-ish green colors trace hydrogen and oxygen atoms, respectively, that have been excited and ionized by the nebula's central white dwarf. The headphone shape, where two lobes of hydrogen puncture the inner region of oxygen, adds this object to a long list of oddly shaped nebulae. The morphology of such strange nebulae hint at the presence of a stellar or planetary companion, which can stir the material flowing out from the dying star. You can listen to Hubble and JWST sonifications of planetary nebulae through your very own headphones!
via NASA APOD
1158 Luda (1929 QF)
via NASA/JPL Small-Body Database
1158 Luda, provisional designation 1929 QF, is a stony asteroid from the middle regions of the asteroid belt, approximately 19 kilometers in diameter. It was discovered on 31 August 1929, by Soviet astronomer Grigory Neujmin at Simeiz Observatory on the Crimean peninsula. It was named after Ludmilla Neujmin, the sister of the discoverer.
Orbit and classification
via Wikipedia infobox
via Wikidata · CC0
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).