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Recent Additions
Laser Guide Star
Aiming at a cosmic tarantula
It might look like we started a space war, but we didn't. This isn't a scene from Star Wars either. What we're looking at is the Tarantula Nebula. And those beams come from the lasers installed on the telescopes that comprise ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer. The VLTI combines the...
Pictor II
Pictor II ultra-faint dwarf galaxy
This image shows stars in the ultra-faint dwarf galaxy, Pictor II. Pictor II is a satellite galaxy of the Large Magellanic Cloud, which is a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, and is located in the constellation Pictor. The system is made up of several thousand stars and is more than ten...
Pictor II
Star PicII-503 in Pictor II ultra-faint dwarf galaxy
This image shows the star PicII-503, with the lowest iron content ever measured outside of the Milky Way. With less than 1/40,000th the amount of iron as the Sun, PicII-503 is the clearest example of a star within a primordial system that preserves the chemical enrichment of the Universe’s...
Crab Nebula
Crab Nebula (2024 Hubble image)
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured the intricate detail of the Crab Nebula with its Wide Field Camera 3. The colours in the image trace Hubble’s detection of oxygen and sulfur gases in the nebula at varying densities and energies. The blue areas are the hottest and lowest density....
Crab Nebula
Crab Nebula (new image from 1999/2000 data)
This newly processed image comes from data originally captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope in 1999 and 2000. Updated image-processing technology allows for this archival image to be best compared with more recent data, including those captured by Hubble itself. Hubble received a new...
Where spiral arms and star formation meet
A luminous swirl set against the deep black of space, the barred spiral galaxy IC 486 glows with a soft, ethereal light in this new ESA/Hubble Picture of the Month image. IC 486 lies right on the edge of the constellation Gemini (the Twins), around 380 million light-years from Earth. Classified...
IC 486
IC 486 (wide-field view)
IC 486 lies in the constellation Gemini (the Twins), around 380 million light-years from Earth. Classified as a barred spiral galaxy, it features a bright central bar-shaped structure from which its spiral arms unfurl, wrapping around the core in a smooth, almost ring-like pattern. This...
Andromeda
Hubble M31 PHAT+PHAST Mosaic
This is the largest photomosaic ever assembled from Hubble Space Telescope observations. It is a panoramic view of the neighboring Andromeda galaxy, located 2.5 million light-years away. It took over 10 years to make this vast and colorful portrait of the galaxy, requiring over 600 Hubble...
V960 Mon
The sky around the star V960 Mon
This image shows the sky around the location of the star V960 Mon. This picture was created from images in the Digitized Sky Survey 2.
NGC 6543
Euclid and Hubble's view of Cat's Eye Nebula
For this month’s ESA/Hubble Picture of the Month, we turn our gaze to one of the most visually intricate remnants of a dying star: the Cat’s Eye Nebula, also known as NGC 6543. This extraordinary planetary nebula lies roughly 4 400 light-years away in the constellation Draco, and has captivated...
NGC 1637
NASA’s Webb Telescope Locates Former Star That Exploded as Supernova
The main image at left shows a view of spiral galaxy NGC 1637 from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble’s shorter-wavelength data is represented in blue and green, while Webb’s longer-wavelength data is represented in green and red. Panels at the right show a...
Circinus Galaxy
Circinus Galaxy (Hubble and Webb)
This image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope shows a full view of the Circinus galaxy, a nearby spiral galaxy about 13 million light-years away. The inset highlights a Webb close-up of the galaxy’s core, where infrared observations pierce through dust to reveal hot material feeding its central...
Featured from the Archive
Beta Pictoris
Beta Pictoris (NIRCam Image)
This image from Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) shows the star system Beta Pictoris. An edge-on disk of dusty debris generated by collisions between planetesimals (orange) dominates the view. A hotter, secondary disk (cyan) is inclined by about 5 degrees relative to the primary disk. The...
