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Messier 64 Blackeye: A collision of two galaxies has left a merged star system with an unusual appearance as well as bizarre internal motions. Messier 64 (M64) has a spectacular dark band of absorbing dust in front of the galaxy's bright nucleus, giving rise to its nicknames of the "Black Eye" or "Evil Eye" galaxy. It resides roughly 17 million light-years from Earth. — More....
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Messier 104, Sombrero Galaxy: Astronomers, who assemble many of HST's most stunning pictures, celebrated its five-year anniversary with the release of the picturesque Sombrero galaxy. The photo reveals a swarm of stars in a pancake-shaped disk as well as a glowing central halo of stars. As seen from Earth, the galaxy is tilted nearly edge-on. — More....
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Menzel 3 or Mz 3, Planetary Nebula: From ground-based telescopes, the so-called ant nebula resembles the head and thorax of a garden-variety ant. This dramatic NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image, showing 10 times more detail, reveals the ant's body as a pair of fiery lobes protruding from a dying, Sun-like star. — More....
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MS1054 0321 Galaxy Cluster: These images, taken by three different telescopes, show the distant, hefty cluster, containing thousands of galaxies and trillions of stars. Weighing the equivalent of several thousand of our Milky Ways, the cluster is 8 billion light-years from Earth. The blue color represents the hot gas that fills the space between the galaxies. — More....
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 | N11b, Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC): HST captures this iridescent tapestry of star birth in a neighboring galaxy in this panoramic view of glowing gas, dark dust clouds, and young, hot stars. This star-forming region is only 160,000 light-years from Earth. Within the LMC, N11 is surpassed in size and activity only by the immense Tarantula nebula. — More....
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 | N11b, Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), view shifted to right: Farther to the right of the above image, along the top edge, are several smaller dark clouds of interstellar dust with odd and intriguing shapes. They are silhouetted against interstellar gas. Several of these dark clouds are bright-rimmed because they are being evaporated by radiation from neighboring hot stars. — More…
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N44F in LMC, A Celestial Geode: An object is being inflated by a torrent of fast-moving particles (called a "stellar wind") from an exceptionally hot star once buried inside a cold dense cloud. Compared with our Sun (which is losing mass through the so-called "solar wind"), the central star in N44F is ejecting more than a 100 million times more mass per second. — More…
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N49 or DEM L 190, in the Large Magellanic Cloud: Resembling the puffs of smoke and sparks from a summer fireworks display these delicate filaments are actually sheets of debris from a stellar explosion in a neighboring galaxy. This remnant is from a massive star that died in a supernova blast whose light would have reached Earth thousands of years ago. — More…
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N159 Papillon nebula: A HST view of a turbulent cauldron of starbirth taking place 170,000 light-years away in our satellite galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. Torrential stellar winds from hot newborn massive stars within the nebula sculpt ridges, arcs, and filaments in the vast cloud, which is over 150 light-years across. — More....
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N159 Papillon nebula (cont): A possible explanation of this bipolar shape is the outflow of gas from massive stars (over 10 times the mass of our sun) hidden in the central absorption zone. Such stars are so hot that their radiation pressure halts the infall of gas and directs it away from the stars in two opposite directions. — More....
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N159 Papillon nebula (cont): A rare type of compact ionized "blob" is resolved for the first time to be a butterfly-shaped or "Papillon" (French for "butterfly") nebula, buried in the center of the maelstrom of glowing gases and dark dust. The unprecedented details of the structure of the Papillon, itself less than 2 light-years in size (about 2 arcseconds in the sky), are seen. — More....
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N159 Papillon nebula (cont): The red in this true-color image is from the emission of hydrogen and the yellow from high excitation ionized oxygen. The picture was taken on September 5, 1998 with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. — More....
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N44C : Resembling the hair in Botticelli's famous portrait of the birth of Venus, softly glowing filaments stream from a complex of hot young stars. N44C is the designation for a region of glowing hydrogen gas surrounding an association of young stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a nearby, small companion galaxy to the Milky Way visible from the Southern Hemisphere. — More....
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"The Blob" -- N 81: NASA's HST has peered deep into a neighboring galaxy to reveal details of the formation of new stars. Hubble's target was a newborn star cluster within the Small Magellanic Cloud, a small galaxy that is a satellite of our own Milky Way. The new images show young, brilliant stars cradled within a nebula, or glowing cloud of gas, cataloged as N 81. — More....
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"The Blob" -- N 81 cont: The massive, recently formed stars inside N 81 are losing material at a high rate, sending out strong stellar winds and shock waves and hollowing out a cocoon within the surrounding nebula. The two most luminous stars, seen as a very close pair near the center, emit copious UV radiation, causing the nebula to glow through fluorescence. — More....
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Nebula N83b, in NGC 1748: Young, massive, ultra-bright stars are seen here just as they are born and emerge from the shelter of their pre-natal molecular cloud. Catching these hefty stars at their birthplace is not as easy as it may seem. Their high mass means that the young stars evolve very rapidly and are hard to find at this critical stage. — More....
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