Cepheus: Trunk to Bubble
9.09.2010

Star clusters, glowing nebulae and dark dust clouds abound in Cepheus, royal constellation of the northern hemisphere. You can follow them in amazing detail across this broad skyscape, a mosaic of telescopic images spanning about 17 degrees. Beginning at the lower left, the large emission nebula is cataloged as IC 1396.

Sh2-239: Celestial Impasto
8.12.2011

The cosmic brush of star formation composed this alluring mix of dust and dark nebulae. Cataloged as Sh2-239 and LDN 1551, the region lies near the southern end of the Taurus molecular cloud complex some 450 light-years distant.

Sharpless 308: Star Bubble
23.06.2015

Blown by fast winds from a hot, massive star, this cosmic bubble is huge. Cataloged as Sharpless 2-308 it lies some 5,200 light-years away toward the constellation of the Big Dog (Canis Major) and covers slightly more of the sky than a Full Moon.

The New World Atlas of Artificial Sky Brightness
30.06.2016

How far are you from a naturally dark night sky? In increasing steps, this world map (medium | large) shows the effect of artificial night sky brightness on the visual appearance of the night sky. The brightness was modeled using high resolution satellite data and fit to thousands of night sky brightness measurements in recent work.

NGC 1055 Close up
9.11.2017

Big, beautiful spiral galaxy NGC 1055 is a dominant member of a small galaxy group a mere 60 million light-years away toward the aquatically intimidating constellation Cetus. Seen edge-on, the island universe spans over 100,000 light-years, a little larger than our own Milky Way.

M42: The Great Orion Nebula
29.11.2017

Few astronomical sights excite the imagination like the nearby stellar nursery known as the Orion Nebula. The Nebula's glowing gas surrounds hot young stars at the edge of an immense interstellar molecular cloud.

Stars, Dust, and Gas near NGC 3572
28.05.2019

Star formation can be colorful. This chromatic cosmic portrait features glowing gas and dark dust near some recently formed stars of NGC 3572, a little-studied star cluster near the Carina Nebula. Stars from...

Wolf Rayet Star 124: Stellar Wind Machine
8.03.2020

Some stars explode in slow motion. Rare, massive Wolf-Rayet stars are so tumultuous and hot that they are slowly disintegrating right before our telescopes. Glowing gas globs each typically over 30 times more massive than the Earth are being expelled by violent stellar winds.

Cygnus Without Stars
30.11.2020

The sky is filled with faintly glowing gas, though it can take a sensitive camera and telescope to see it. For example, this twelve-degree-wide view of the northern part of the constellation Cygnus reveals a complex array of cosmic clouds of gas along the plane of our Milky Way galaxy.

M64: The Evil Eye Galaxy
29.03.2021

Who knows what evil lurks in the eyes of galaxies? The Hubble knows -- or in the case of spiral galaxy M64 -- is helping to find out. Messier 64, also known as the Evil...