“We have this disappointment that maybe our own sun won’t participate in making a spectacular butterfly, or a cigar-shaped nebula.”

It left a cigar-shaped patch of scorched earth, a stretch of open ground that meant death-by-sniper-bullet to anyone brave enough to run across it.

Its neighbor M82, also known as Bode's Nebula, is an elongated, cigar-shaped galaxy that shines at magnitude 8.2, making it another easy target with binoculars.