The BBB Nebula has an official name in the annals of the fleet's ever expanding star charts, but in the popular imagination its name comes from the cloud-minding habits of human beings, and their three most common visions upon seeing the nebula for the first time.
It was near Christmas time on earth, and many people in the Northern Hemisphere thought of the shining white ribbons tied on presents at that time, so there, the first B: the Bow.
Also in the Northern Hemisphere, people thought of the great white polar bear because of the “head” on the left-hand side, and the suggestion of the bipedal form, so, the second B: the Bear.
Yet in the Southern Hemisphere, Christmas comes nearly at summertime, and so what was thought of there was the third B: the Butterfly.
So much for the popular imagination, and its limitations. I would have made of those three Bs the recognition of one word: beware.
The BBB Nebula is the the remnant of a relatively recent supernova and is still at multi-millions of degrees. Thinking of it as the Bow is somewhat helpful in this sense, as there are ribbons of gases cooling at different rates. If you look carefully, you can still see that it is mostly white-hot still, with some still-hotter blue portions and some portions just beginning to get down to red-hot.
The picture above is of course at great magnification – it will still be another century before close examination will be possible.
Until then, humanity visits in its imagination, which of course explains the nebula's unofficial but enduring nickname.
This of course is a pure fractal made in Apophysis 2.09, and of course you can trace my process of seeing what there was to see in this remarkable figure!