The scary, spooky times of Halloween are upon us. Though not yet time to howl at the moon, which will be full phase on November 5, the luminous heavens hold eerie surprises.

Deep in southern hemisphere skies is a small, faint galaxy. Its location, very close to the plane of the Milky Way, made it mostly obscured until 1975. NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope pierced the stellar dust with infrared light. A poisonous spider was revealed, lurking in a double bubble gas cloud. Radiation and intense winds created bubble cavities. Tumultuous stellar formation brews in the Black Widow Spider Nebula’s hourglass shape. Wispy streams flowing from the nebula’s core shape the spider’s creeping legs.

Striding the celestial equator is the great hunter, Orion, a constellation visible through most of the world. His kneecap, the giant blue star Rigel, points our direction towards a dusty pointy-chin profile. Through a telescope, the ghostly reflection nebula emerges as the Witch Head Nebula. This haunting image is believed to be remnants of an ancient supernova.

Scarier still is what we cannot directly see. Black Holes: regions in space where gravity is so powerful that nothing escapes, not even light. Matter venturing too close gets sucked in, hideously shredded by what Stephen Hawking called the “spaghettification” effect. Laws of physics as we know them are obliterated over the edge of the Event Horizon.