The Heart Of NGC 4261
6.11.1999

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of galaxies? The Hubble knows. This Hubble Space Telescope picture of the center of the nearby elliptical galaxy NGC 4261 tells one dramatic tale. The gas and dust in this disk are swirling into what is almost certainly a massive black hole.

Equinox and Eruptive Prominence
23.09.1999

Today, the Sun crosses the celestial equator and seasons change from Summer to Fall in the north and Winter to Spring in the southern hemisphere. Defined by the Sun's position in sky the event is known as an equinox - the length of daylight is equal to the length of night.

CG4: A Ruptured Cometary Globule
13.05.2014

Can a gas cloud grab a galaxy? It's not even close. The "claw" of this odd looking "creature" in the above photo is a gas cloud known as a cometary globule. This globule, however, has ruptured. Cometary globules are typically characterized by dusty heads and elongated tails.

M43: Dust, Gas, and Stars in the Orion Nebula
5.07.2020

Unspeakable beauty and unimaginable bedlam can be found together in the Orion Nebula Arguably the most famous of all astronomy nebulas, the Great Nebula in Orion is an immense interstellar molecular cloud only 1500 light-years away.

Merging Galaxy Pair IIZw096
1.12.2022

Bright at infrared wavelengths, this merging galaxy pair is some 500 million light-years away toward the constellation Delphinus. The cosmic mashup is seen against a background of even more distant galaxies, and occasional spiky foreground stars. But the galaxy merger itself spans about 100,000 light-years in this deep James Webb Space Telescope image.

The Swirling Center of NGC 4261
4.12.1995

What evil lurks in the hearts of galaxies? The above picture by the Hubble Space Telescope of the center of the nearby galaxy NGC 4261 tells us one dramatic tale. Here gas and dust are seen swirling near this elliptical galaxy's center into what is almost certainly a massive black hole.

The Eagle Nebula from CFHT
12.02.2003

Bright blue stars are still forming in the dark pillars of the Eagle Nebula. Made famous by a picture from the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995, the Eagle Nebula shows the dramatic process of star formation. To the upper right of the nebula in the above picture lies the heart of the open cluster M16.

M100: A Grand Design
6.06.1998

Majestic on a truly cosmic scale, M100 is appropriately known as a Grand Design spiral galaxy. A large galaxy of over 100 billion or so stars with well defined spiral arms, it is similar to our own Milky Way.

Star EGGs in the Eagle Nebula
22.10.2006

Where do stars form? One place, star forming regions known as "EGGs", are uncovered at the end of this giant pillar of gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula (M16). EGGs, short for evaporating gaseous globules, are dense regions of mostly molecular hydrogen gas that fragment and gravitationally collapse to form stars.

A Rocket Booster Falls Back to Earth
1.08.2016

What's that crossing the sky? Although it looked a bit like a large meteor, it was actually the booster of a Chinese rocket returning to Earth after its launch two days earlier.