The Seagull Nebula
8.03.2012

A broad expanse of glowing gas and dust presents a bird-like visage to astronomers from planet Earth, suggesting its popular moniker - The Seagull Nebula. This portrait of the cosmic bird covers a 1.6 degree wide swath across the plane of the Milky Way, near the direction of Sirius, alpha star of the constellation Canis Major.

MyCn18: An Hourglass Planetary Nebula
10.05.2015

The sands of time are running out for the central star of this hourglass-shaped planetary nebula. With its nuclear fuel exhausted, this brief, spectacular, closing phase of a Sun-like star's life occurs as its outer layers are ejected - its core becoming a cooling, fading white dwarf.

IC 2574: Coddington's Nebula
6.02.2025

Grand spiral galaxies often seem to get all the glory, flaunting their young, bright, blue star clusters in beautiful, symmetric spiral arms. But small, irregular galaxies form stars too. In fact dwarf galaxy IC 2574 shows clear evidence of intense star forming activity in its telltale reddish regions of glowing hydrogen gas.

Polar Ring Galaxy NGC 4650A
10.05.1999

NGC 4650A appears to be two galaxies in one. A rare type of galaxy known as a Polar Ring, NGC 4650A is composed of an old central group of stars and a young ring of stars rotating farther out. Both components are clearly visible in this featured photograph by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Sirius, Sun, Moon, and Southern Cross
7.07.2000

From left to right are the enclosures of Yepun (ye-poon; Sirius), Antu (an-too; Sun), Kueyen (qua-yen; Moon), and Melipal (me-li-pal; Southern Cross), pictured here as night falls at Paranal Observatory in northern Chile. These are the four 8.2 meter wide telescope units of the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT).

Hen 1357: New Born Nebula
6.10.2001

This Hubble Space Telescope snapshot shows Hen-1357, the youngest known planetary nebula. Graceful, gentle curves and symmetry suggest its popular name - The Stingray Nebula. Observations in the 1970s detected no nebular material, but this image from March 1996 clearly shows the Stingray's emerging bubbles and rings of shocked and ionized gas.

NGC 7293: The Helix Nebula
17.04.1996

The Helix nebula (New General Catalog number 7293) is estimated to be a mere 450 light-years from the Sun, in the direction of the constellation Aquarius. At that distance it may well be the closest planetary nebula, offering a dramatic snapshot of a brief final evolutionary stage in the life of a solar-type star.

Infrared Helix
1.09.1997

Five hundred light years from Earth, in the constellation Aquarius, a sun-like star is dying. Its last few thousand years have produced the Helix, a well studied and nearby example of a Planetary Nebula - typical of this final phase of stellar evolution.

Molecular Cloud Barnard 68
11.05.1999

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. Here, a high concentration of dust and molecular gas absorb practically all the visible light emitted from background stars.

Saturn Storm by Ringshine
23.02.2006

Imaged on the night side of Saturn by the Cassini spacecraft, these swirling storm clouds are illuminated by ringshine - sunlight reflected from the gas giant's magnificent ring system. The storm (top) was actually spotted last month by amateur astronomers as it rotated across Saturn's day side and spans about 3,500 kilometers.