Nebulas
 Hubble catches a Butterfly Nebula NEW! Hubble snags a Stingray Nebula NEW!  A close up of the interior of the Orion Nebula. (37 k) NEW! The Orion Nebula in all it's glory. (19 k) The Crab Nebula with spectacular detail. (11 k)  Killer tie dye, duuude! Not! More like the Bubble Nebula (NGC 7635), 10 light-years across and shaped by strong stellar winds of material and radiation produced by the bright star at the left. (15 k) And here's an encore. Another amazing shot of the Bubble Nebula.NEW!  NOT a Cats Eye (?) (13 k)  Another butterfly? Two jellyfish kissing? M2-9 is a bipolar planetary nebula. Another more revealing name might be the "Twin Jet Nebula." It appears much like a pair of exhausts from super-super-sonic jet engines (the velocity of the gas is in excess of 200 miles per second). the stellar outburst that formed the lobes occurred just 1,200 years ago. (32 k)  Portion of the "Cygnus Loop" nebula. A region 6x the lunar diameter, it is the expanding blastwave from a supernova explosion - which occurred 15,000 years ago. (67 k) |
| Hubble photographed a planetary nebula called NGC 6751 in the constellation Aquila resembling a glowing eye!
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. |
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| Hubble Captures a Wavy Red Spider Got a case of arachnophobia? This image of the largest spider in the universe will likely produce more amazement than terror. The new Hubble image presets an awe-inspiring look at the rippling legs of the Red Spider Nebula. 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. |
 Red Spider Nebula CLOSE UP PHOTO |
