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Cresent Nebula: HST has snapped a view of a stellar demolition zone in our Milky Way Galaxy: a massive star, nearing the end of its life, tearing apart the shell of surrounding material it blew off 250,000 years ago with its strong stellar wind. The shell of blue material surrounds the "hefty," aging, super-hot star WR 136, called a Wolf-Rayet. — More....
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Cygnus Loop: This supernova remnant marks the edge of a bubble-like, expanding blast wave from a colossal stellar explosion which occurred about 15,000 years ago. The supernova blast wave is slamming into tenuous clouds of interstellar gas. This collision heats and compresses the gas, causing it to glow. The Loop appears as a faint ring of glowing gases ... — Cont....
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Cygnus Loop, close-up: In this image the supernova blast wave, which is moving from left to right across the field of view, has recently hit a cloud of denser than average interstellar gas. This collision drives shock waves into the cloud that heats interstellar gas. This supernova remnant lies 2,500 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus the Swan. — Cont....
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Deep View: Several hundred never before seen galaxies are visible in this "deepest-ever" view (Dec. 1995) of the universe, called the Hubble Deep Field (HDF), made with HST. Besides the classical spiral and elliptical galaxies, there is a bewildering variety of other galaxy shapes and colors that are important clues to understanding the evolution of the universe. — More....
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Deep Field: HST reached back to nearly the beginning of time to sample thousands of infant galaxies. This image, taken with Hubble's ACS (Feb. 2003), shows several thousand galaxies, many of which appear to be interacting or in the process of forming. Some of these galaxies existed when the cosmos was less than about 2 billion years old. — More....
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DEM L 106, Double Bubble N30B, reflection nebula: A unique peanut-shaped cocoon of dust, called a reflection nebula, surrounds a cluster of young, hot stars in this view from HST. The "double bubble," N30B, is inside a larger nebula. The larger nebula, DEM L 106, is embedded in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way lying 160,000 light-years away. More....
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 | 30 Doradus Nebula: A panorama of a vast landscape of gas and dust where thousands of stars are being born. This star-forming region has a sparkling stellar centerpiece: the most spectacular cluster of massive stars in our neighborhood of about 25 galaxies. The photo offers an unprecedented view of the entire inner region measuring 200 light-years wide by 150 light-years high. — More....
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Dumbbell Nebula; or M27; or Messier 27; or NGC 6853
The first "planetary nebula" ever discovered: M27 is about 1240 light-years away and about 1.5 light-years in diameter. The nebula was formed when an evolved, red giant star ejected its outer envelope near the end of its lifetime. The gas became visible once the hot core of the star, seen near the center, was exposed and the high-energy, ultraviolet light from the core ionized the cloud. — In the right-most image, the aging star's last hurrah is creating a flurry of glowing knots of gas that appear to be streaking through space. — More....
[For a visual perspective of how large the stars are that create such phenomenal events, take a look at a star SMALLER than M27.]
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Eagle Nebula - M16: Undersea corral? Enchanted castles? Space serpents? These eerie, dark pillar-like structures are actually columns of cool interstellar hydrogen gas and dust that are also incubators for new stars. They are part of a nearby star-forming region 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Serpens. — More....
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Egg Nebula, CRL 2688: The Egg Nebula is shown as it appears in visible light with the HST's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2). Objects like the Egg Nebula are helping astronomers understand how stars like our Sun expel carbon and nitrogen — elements crucial for life — into space. Studies show that these dying stars eject matter at very high speeds — (See next image).
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Egg Nebula, rainbow image of dusty star: The Egg Nebula, located 3,000 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, offers a special look at the normally invisible dust shells swaddling an aging star. These dust layers, extending over one-tenth of a light-year from the star, have an onionskin structure that forms concentric rings. — More....
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Einstein Cross, G2237 + 0305: The ESA's FOC on board HST has provided the most detailed image ever taken of G2237 + 0305. — The photo shows four images of a very distant quasar which has been multiple-imaged by a relatively nearby galaxy acting as a gravitational lens. The angular separation between the upper and lower images is 1.6 arc seconds.
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ESO418-008, ultraviolet galaxy: Astronomers are using these NASA Hubble Space Telescope images to help tackle the question of why distant galaxies have such odd shapes, appearing markedly different from the typical elliptical and spiral galaxies seen in the nearby universe. Also, these galaxies are much smaller than typical ones like our Milky Way. — More....
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ESO 510 G13, warped spiral galaxy: An edge-on view of an unusual spiral galaxy, revealing remarkable details of its warped dusty disk and showing how colliding galaxies spawn the formation of new generations of stars. The dust and spiral arms of normal spiral galaxies, like our own Milky Way, appear flat when viewed edge-on. — More....
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Eta Carinae, Supermassive Variable Star: A huge, billowing pair of gas and dust clouds are captured in this stunning HST image of the supermassive star Eta Carinae. Even though Eta Carinae is more than 8,000 light-years away, structures only 10 billion miles across (about the diameter of our solar system) can be distinguished. — More....
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Eta Carinae, close-up view of effects: A small portion of the rough-and-tumble neighborhood of swirling dust and gas near one of the most massive and eruptive stars in our galaxy is seen in this NASA Hubble Space Telescope image. This close-up view shows only a three light-year-wide portion of the entire Carina Nebula, which has a diameter of over 200 light-years. — More....
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G1 or Mayhall II: HST captured a view of a globular cluster, a large, bright ball of light in the center of the photograph consisting of at least 300,000 old stars. The cluster orbits the Andromeda galaxy (M31), the nearest major spiral galaxy to our Milky Way. Located 130,000 light-years from Andromeda's nucleus, G1 is the brightest globular cluster in the Local Group of galaxies. — More....
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Gamma-Ray Burst, Fireball, mysterious explosion puzzles astronomers: The visible fireball from a titanic explosion in deep space, called a gamma-ray burst, blazes in the center of this image, taken with the CCD camera (Charge Coupled Device) on the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, a new instrument on Hubble Space Telescope. — More....
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 | Gamma Ray Burst 971214, source discovered: A team of astronomers has announced that a recently detected gamma-ray burst was as bright as the rest of the universe, releasing a hundred times more energy than previously theorized. It was discovered earlier using the Keck 10-m telescope, but it is shown here as seen with a superior sharpness of the HST. — More....
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Gamma-ray Fireball, the most powerfull ever recorded: NASA HST views of the rapidly fading fireball from the most powerful cosmic explosion recorded to date. For a brief moment the light from the blast was equal to the radiance of 100 million billion stars. The initial explosion began as an intense burst of gamma-rays which happened on Jan. 23, 1999. — More....
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Gomez's Hamburger: Hold the pickles; hold the lettuce. Space is serving up giant hamburgers. HST snapped a shot of a strange object that bears an uncanny resemblance to a hamburger. Nicknamed Gomez's Hamburger, it is a sun-like star nearing the end of its life. It already has expelled large amounts of gas and dust and is on its way to becoming a planetary nebula. — More....
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 Gravitational Lens J033238-275653: Like a photographer clicking random snapshots of a crowd of people, NASA's HST has taken a view of an eclectic mix of galaxies. The ACS was not looking at any particular target. The camera was taking a picture of a typical patch of sky, while Hubble's infrared camera was viewing a target in an adjacent galaxy-rich region. — More....
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Gravitationally Lensed, CL1358+62: Exact measurement of the distance from observations with the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii show the lensed galaxy is the farthest ever seen. Its light is only reaching us now from a time when the universe was but 7% its current age of approximately 14 billion years. This places the young galaxy as far as 13 billion light-years away. — More....
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