Pretty Pictures of the Cosmos

1. Pretty Pictures of the Cosmos

2. The Sharpest View of the Sun This stunning image shows remarkable and mysterious details near the dark central region of a planet-sized sunspot in one of the sharpest views ever of the surface of the Sun.

3. Jupiter, Io and Shadow Pictured is the innermost of Jupiter's Galilean satellites, Io, superposed in front of the gas giant planet. To the left of Io is a dark spot that is Io's own shadow.

4. The Orion Nebula Orion, the Hunter, is one of the most easily recognizable constellations in planet Earth's night sky.

5. The Pleiades Star Cluster It is the most famous star cluster on the sky. The Pleiades can be seen without binoculars from even the depths of a light-polluted city. Also known as the Seven Sisters and M45, the Pleiades is one of the brightest and closest open clusters. The Pleiades contains over 3000 stars, is about 400 light years away, and only 13 light years across.

6. Leonid Meteor Shower These meteors come from sand-sized particles ejected from Comet Tempel-Tuttle during trips to the inner Solar System in 1767 and 1866

7. The Trifid Nebula Unspeakable beauty and unimaginable bedlam can be found together in the Trifid Nebula. Also known as M20, this photogenic nebula is visible with good binoculars towards the constellation of Sagittarius. The energetic processes of star formation create not only the colors but the chaos.

8. NGC 604 Starbirth Region Scattered within this cavernous nebula, cataloged as NGC 604, are over 200 newly formed hot, massive, stars. At 1,500 light-years across, this expansive cloud of interstellar gas and dust is effectively a giant stellar nursery located some three million light-years distant in the spiral galaxy, M33.

9. Orion's Horsehead Nebula The Horsehead Nebula is one of the most famous nebulae on the sky. It is visible as the dark indentation to the red emission nebula seen above and to the right of center in the photograph.

10. The Eagle Nebula, M16 From afar, the whole thing looks like an Eagle. A closer look of the Eagle Nebula, however, shows the bright region is actually a window into the center of a larger dark shell of dust.

11. M16: Stars from Eagle Newborn stars are forming in the Eagle Nebula. This image, taken with the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995, shows evaporating gaseous globules (EGGs) emerging from pillars of molecular hydrogen gas and dust. The giant pillars are light years in length and are so dense that interior gas contracts gravitationally to form stars.

12. Molecular Cloud Barnard 68 Dark Nebula Where did all the stars go? What used to be considered a hole in the sky is now known to astronomers as a dark molecular cloud.

13. Cat's Eye Nebula Three thousand light-years away, a dying star throws off shells of glowing gas. This image from the Hubble Space Telescope reveals the Cat's Eye Nebula to be one of the most complex planetary nebulae known.

14. The Eskimo Nebula, NGC 2392 From the ground, NGC 2392 resembles a person's head surrounded by a parka hood. From space, the nebula displays gas clouds so complex they are not fully understood. The Eskimo Nebula is a planetary nebula, the gases of which composed the outer layers of a Sun-like star only 10,000 years ago. The inner filaments visible are being ejected by strong wind of particles from the central star. The outer disk contains unusual light-year long orange filaments. The Eskimo Nebula lies about 5000 light-years away in the constellation of Gemini.

15. NGC 6369: The Little Ghost Nebula This pretty planetary nebula was discovered by 18th century astronomer William Herschel as he used a telescope to explore the constellation Ophiucus. The nebula's main ring structure is about a light-year across and the glow from ionized oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen atoms are colored blue, green, and red respectively. Over 2,000 light-years away, the Little Ghost Nebula offers a glimpse of the fate of our Sun, which should produce its own pretty planetary nebula only about 5-7 billion years from now.

16. The Dumbbell Nebula, M27 The first hint of what will become of our Sun was discovered inadvertently in 1764. The Dumbbell Nebula, is a planetary nebula, the type of nebula our Sun will produce when nuclear fusion stops in its core. M27 is one of the brightest planetary nebulae on the sky, and can be seen in the constellation Vulpecula with binoculars. It takes light about 1000 years to reach us from M27.

17. IC 418: The Spirograph Nebula What is creating the strange texture of IC 418? Dubbed the Spirograph Nebula for its resemblance to drawings from a cyclical drawing tool, planetary nebula IC 418 shows patterns that are not well understood.

18. The Bubble Nebula, NGC 7635 Seemingly adrift in a cosmic sea of stars and gas, this delicate, floating apparition is cataloged as NGC 7635. In this wide-angle view, the Bubble nebula lies at the center of a larger complex of shocked glowing gas about 11,000 light-years distant in the fair constellation Cassiopeia. NGC 7635 really is an interstellar bubble, blown by winds from the brightest star visible within the bubble's boundary. The bubble's expansion is constrained by the surrounding material. About 10 light-years in diameter, if the Bubble nebula were centered on the Sun, the Sun's nearest stellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri, would also be enclosed.

19. NGC 6960: The Witch's Broom Nebula Ten thousand years ago, before the dawn of recorded human history, a new light must suddenly have appeared in the night sky and faded after a few weeks. Today we know this light was an exploding star and the record is the colorful expanding cloud known as the Veil Nebula.

20. Spiral Galaxy M33 Spiral galaxy M33 is a mid-sized member of our Local Group of Galaxies. M33 is also called the Triangulum Galaxy for the constellation in which it resides. About four times smaller (in radius) than our Milky Way Galaxy and the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), it is much larger than the many of the local spheroidal dwarf-galaxies.

21. Arp 188 and the Tadpole's Tidal Tail In this stunning image recorded with the Hubble Space Telescope, distant galaxies form a dramatic backdrop for disrupted spiral galaxy Arp 188, the Tadpole Galaxy. The cosmic Tadpole is a mere 420 million light-years distant toward the northern constellation Draco. Its eye-catching tail is about 280 thousand light-years long and features massive, bright blue star clusters. One story goes that a more compact intruder galaxy crossed in front of Arp 188 - from left to right in this view - and was slung around behind the Tadpole by their gravitational attraction.

22. Seyfert's Sextet This intriguing group of galaxies lies in the head portion of the split constellation Serpens. The sextet actually contains only four interacting galaxies, though.

23. Abell 1689 Warps Space Two billion light-years away, galaxy cluster Abell 1689 is one of the most massive objects in the Universe. The power of this enormous gravitational lens depends on its mass, but the visible matter, in the form of the cluster's yellowish galaxies, only accounts for about one percent of the mass needed to make the observed bluish arcing images of background galaxies.