Hubblevision 
     Hubble Space Telescope Images 

Amazing photos of nebulae and galaxies! 

The star cluster in the image center contains young, massive stars. Their stellar winds have cleared away a pocket in the gas cloud surrounding them, and eroded pillar-shaped structures (top left) of dense gas and dust. Below the cluster are two protoplanetary disks (proplyds) which contain newly forming stars. At upper right are dark areas called Bok globules.

Nebulas

The nebula was found 6,500 light-years from Earth and is an odd planetary nebula because it resembles another type of solar explosion called a supernova. It looks like somebody ripped it apart into little pieces. Experts aren’t sure why exactly this particular planetary nebula looks so odd compared to other planetary nebulas.

Also known as NGC 6537, the twin-lobed planetary nebula is the gaseous remains of material shed from a collapsed star in Sagittarius. The huge wrinkles seen in the lobes are produced by high-speed stellar winds hurtling away from the dense, central star and impacting the surrounding gas. 

Hubble took images of the Red Spider at five different wavelengths in 1997. These images reveal that the white dwarf at the heart of the nebula has a temperature of at least half a million degrees, making it one of the hottest stars around. The gaseous lobes are also searing hot, with temperatures exceeding 17,000 degrees F (10,000 degrees C). 

The composite image shows the product of rapid stellar winds shooting away from the blistering star at speeds up to 2,800 miles (4,500 km) per second. Like Earthly winds blowing across an ocean, these stellar winds push against the gas, forming magnificent waves that crest as high as 62 billion miles (100 billion km) and break at the lobes' edges.

Galaxies

The name is plain: Hoag's Object. But what a sight! Hot, blue stars in a sparkling ring around the core of a galaxy 60 million light years away in the constellation Serpens.

The bright ring is filled with young stars, which are hotter and bluer than the older stars in the yellow core. The "gap" around the core may actually contain faint stars and star clusters. Even a small background galaxy appears just inside the ring at the upper right.

The galaxy is about 120,000 light-years across, slightly larger than our own Milky Way.

This galactic oddity exhibits no sign of a collision with a second galaxy. Some scientists theorize that the blue star circle is the remnant of a galaxy that passed close by the central one, some 2 billion or 3 billion years ago.

Hubble watches two Spiral Galaxies collide
Mmmm, sunny side up? No, a face-on snapshot of the small spiral galaxy NGC 7742. Astronomers think it is powered by a black hole residing in its yolk..., I mean core.  (17 k)

M51 is 20 million light-years away, in the constellation Canes Venatici. Why is M51 so pretty? The bright red spots dotting the spiral arms and dust clouds of galaxy are regions of STAR BIRTHS. These are triggered by the gravity of a neighbor galaxy (just off the edge of the image).

The clusters of young, luminous and energetic stars are glowing red because this is the color of hydrogen gas emissions.

Images from Hubble and Kitt Peak Observatory in Arizona were combined in this composite picture. They reveal the intricate structure of cold dust clouds associated with the hot hydrogen emissions. Note the darker dust "spurs" branching out almost perpendicular to the main spiral arms.