New missions mean new capabilities - and one particularly interesting new mission is finally up and running. Data is starting to come in from SPHEREx, the medium-class surveyor that is mapping the entire sky every six months. A paper based on some of that early data was recently published in The Astrophysical Journal, mapping ice and compounds called Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) throughout some interesting regions of our Milky Way. One of those regions is the Cygnus-X star-forming region. It's located about 4,500 light years away from Earth, and is home to more than 3 million solar masses of material. It also hosts the Cygnus OB2 association, a massive cluster of thousands of young stars, including some highly luminous O-type stars that played a critical role in the recent study. The other region was the North American Nebula - specifically LDN 935, the “dark” region that forms the shape of the “Gulf of Mexico” in that famously shaped nebula that lies 2,600 light years away from Earth.…