The Bubble Nebula is an enormous shell that surrounds a super hot and massive star, formed as it pushes extremely hot gas outward, which collides with the cooler interstellar gas around it. The shell of the Bubble Nebula is seven light-years across, and it is located 8,000 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia. #

The Edge of a Great Spiral. This galaxy, known as NGC 1032, is located about a hundred million light years away in the constellation Cetus. This view is looking right at the edge of what is actually a spectacular spiral galaxy, with a broad disc of gas and dust dimming some of the light of its many stars along the middle. A handful of other more-distant galaxies can be seen lurking in the background, scattered around the narrow stripe of NGC 1032. #

A Shrouded Star. Sh 2-106 is a compact star forming region in the constellation Cygnus. In the center of the image, a newly-formed star called S106 IR sits surrounded by gas and dust, and is responsible for the surrounding gas cloud’s hourglass-like shape and the turbulence visible within. This emission nebula lies about 2,000 light years from Earth. #

A Weather Report From Jupiter. This image of Jupiter, taken by Hubble on August 25, 2020, was captured when the planet was 406 million miles from Earth. Hubble’s sharp view gave researchers an updated weather report on the monster planet’s turbulent atmosphere, including a remarkable new storm brewing, and a cousin of the famous Great Red Spot region gearing up to change color once more. A unique detail of the snapshot appears at mid-northern latitudes as a bright white stretched-out storm traveling around the planet at 350 miles per hour (560 kilometers per hour). This single plume erupted on August 18, 2020, and ground-based observers have discovered two more that appeared later at the same latitude. The icy moon Europa, thought to hold potential ingredients for life, is visible to the left of the gas giant. #

The Outer Reaches of NGC 3432. This long, luminous streak, speckled with bright blisters and pockets of material, is a view of a distant spiral galaxy, seen directly edge-on. The galaxy’s spiral arms and bright core are hidden, and we instead see the thin strip of its very outer reaches. Dark bands of cosmic dust, patches of varying brightness, and pink regions of star formation help with making out the true shape of NGC 3432. #

Gazing into the Lagoon. This image is a close view of Messier 8, known as the Lagoon Nebula, a giant cloud of glowing interstellar gas that is also a stellar nursery. The massive stars hiding within the heart of the nebula give off enormous amounts of ultraviolet radiation, ionizing the surrounding gas and causing it to shine colorfully, as well as sculpting the surrounding nebula into strange shapes. #

A Quiet Center. The delicate, feathery nature of the spiral arms of galaxy NGC 2775 indicate that its recent history of star formation has been relatively quiet. There is virtually no star formation in the central part of the galaxy, which is dominated by an unusually large and relatively empty galactic bulge, where all the gas was converted into stars long ago. NGC 2275 is classified as a flocculent spiral galaxy, located 67 million light-years away in the constellation of Cancer.  Millions of bright, young, blue stars shine in the complex, feather-like spiral arms, interlaced with dark lanes of dust. #

A Fragmented Comet. This image of comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS), taken on April 20, 2020, provides a sharp view of the breakup of the solid nucleus of the comet, showing as many as 30 separate fragments. Hubble could distinguish pieces that were roughly the size of a house. Before the breakup, the entire nucleus of the comet may have been the length of one or two football fields. Astronomers aren't sure why this comet broke apart. The comet was approximately 91 million miles (146 million kilometers) from Earth when the images were taken. #

A Young Nebula. Here we see the cosmic pairing of the star Hen 2-427 (more commonly known as WR 124) and the nebula M1-67 which surrounds it. Both objects are found in the constellation of Sagitta and lie 15,000 light-years away. The star Hen 2-427 shines brightly at the very center of this explosive image where hot clumps of gas are ejected into space at over 93,000 miles per hour. The nebula M1-67 is estimated to be no more than 10,000 years old—just a baby in astronomical terms. #

The Meathook Galaxy. This image features a close view of center and one of the arms of the barred spiral galaxy NGC 2442, nicknamed the Meathook Galaxy, owing to its extremely asymmetrical and irregular shape. The galaxy lies about 50 million light-years away in the constellation Volans. #

A Colorful Cluster. Many colorful stars are packed close together in this image of the globular cluster NGC 1805. This tight grouping of thousands of stars is located near the edge of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our own Milky Way. The stars orbit closely to one another, like bees swarming around a hive. In the dense center of one of these clusters, stars are 100 to 1,000 times closer together than the nearest stars are to our Sun, making planetary systems around them unlikely. This young globular cluster can be seen from the southern hemisphere, in the Dorado constellation. Usually, globular clusters contain stars which are born at the same time; however, NGC 1805 is unusual as it appears to host two different populations  of stars with ages millions of years apart. #

The Cosmic Reef. In this Hubble portrait, the giant red nebula (NGC 2014) and its smaller blue neighbor (NGC 2020) are part of a vast star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, located 163,000 light-years away. The image is nicknamed the "Cosmic Reef," because the nebulas resemble an undersea world. The sparkling centerpiece of NGC 2014 is a grouping of bright, hefty stars, each 10 to 20 times more massive than our Sun. The stars' ultraviolet radiation heats the surrounding dense gas. The massive stars also unleash fierce winds of charged particles that blast away lower-density gas, forming the bubble-like structures seen on the right. By contrast, the seemingly isolated blue nebula at lower left (NGC 2020) has been created by a solitary mammoth star 200,000 times brighter than our Sun. The blue gas was ejected by the star through a series of eruptive events during which it lost part of its outer envelope of material. #

Dark Clouds in the Eagle Nebula. This collection of dazzling stars is called NGC 6611, an open star cluster that formed about 5.5 million years ago and is found approximately 6,500 light-years from the Earth. It is a very young cluster, containing many hot, blue stars, whose fierce ultraviolet glow make the surrounding Eagle Nebula glow. In this image, dark, dense regions of gas and dust, which obstruct light from passing through can also be seen. #

A Distant Spiral. The light shining from the stars in spiral galaxy NGC 2008 traveled through space for the past 425 million years, to be captured by the Hubble space telescope's light sensors and composed into this image. The galaxy was discovered in 1834, and lies in the constellation of Pictor (the Painter’s Easel). #

The Shadow of a Bat. Astronomers using a previously captured Hubble imagery spotted a remarkable image of a young star's unseen, planet-forming disk casting a huge shadow (upper right) across a more distant cloud in a star-forming region. The star is called HBC 672, and the shadow feature was nicknamed the "Bat Shadow" because it resembles a pair of wings. The whole scene is within the Serpens Nebula, a stellar nursery about 1,300 light-years away. #

A Cosmic Butterfly. The Butterfly Nebula, also known as NGC 6302, observed in a wide spectrum of light, from near-ultraviolet to near-infrared. The star or stars at its center are responsible for the nebula's appearance. In their death throes, they have cast off layers of gas periodically over the past couple thousand years. The "wings" of NGC 6302 are regions of gas heated to more than 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit that are tearing across space at more than 600,000 miles an hour. NGC 6302 lies between 2,500 and 3,800 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius. #

A Galactic Dance. In this image, the galaxy NGC 2799 (on the left) is seemingly being pulled into the center of the galaxy NGC 2798 (on the right).  Interacting galaxies, such as these, are so named because of the influence they have on each other, which may eventually result in a merger or a unique formation. Already, these two galaxies have seemingly formed a sideways waterspout, with stars from NGC 2799 appearing to fall into NGC 2798.  Galactic mergers can take place over several hundred million to over a billion years. While one might think the merger of two galaxies would be catastrophic for the stellar systems within, the sheer amount of space between stars means that stellar collisions are unlikely and stars typically drift past each other. #

A Giant Geyser. Herbig-Haro 110 spews hot gas from a newborn star in a streamer about half a light-year long. Herbig–Haro objects are formed when narrow jets of gas are ejected by newborn stars, usually in two streams, colliding with nearby clouds of gas and dust. #

Warped Space. This image of galaxy LRG-3-817 displays distortions due to the effects of gravitational lensing. The galaxy appears as a long arc to the left of the central galaxy cluster. Gravitational lensing occurs when a large distribution of matter, such as a galaxy cluster, sits between Earth and a distant light source. As space is warped by massive objects, the light from the distant object is magnified and bends as it travels to us and we see a distorted image of it. #

A Great Galaxy. Viewed about 60 million light-years from Earth, we see here the Great Barred Spiral Galaxy NGC 1365, where blue and fiery orange swirls show us where stars have just formed and the dusty sites of future stellar nurseries.  At the outer edge, bright, light-blue regions indicate the presence of hundreds of baby stars that formed from coalescing gas and dust within the galaxy's outer arms. #

The Tail of a Young Star. This particular young star, known as IRAS 14568-6304, is cloaked in a haze of golden gas and dust. It appears to be embedded within an intriguing swoosh of dark sky, which curves through the image and obscures the sky behind. This dark region is known as the Circinus molecular cloud. This cloud has a mass around 250 000 times that of the Sun, and it is filled with gas, dust and young stars. IRAS 14568-6304 is driving a protostellar jet, which appears here as the "tail" below the star. This jet is the leftover gas and dust that the star took from its parent cloud in order to form. #

Peering into Pandora's Cluster. Abell 2744, nicknamed Pandora's Cluster, is a huge galaxy cluster thought to have a very violent history, having formed from a cosmic pile-up of multiple galaxy clusters. Nearly every object seen here is a separate galaxy made up of hundreds of millions of individual stars. #

Inside the Lagoon. Seen here, the Lagoon Nebula, about 4,000 light-years away, is an incredible 55 light-years wide and 20 light-years tall. This image shows only a small part of this turbulent star-formation region, about four light-years across. It was first catalogued in 1654 by the Italian astronomer Giovanni Battista Hodierna, who sought to record nebulous objects in the night sky so they would not be mistaken for comets. #

A Dark and Tangled Web. This object, named SNR 0454-67.2, formed in a very violent fashion—it is a supernova remnant, created after a massive star ended its life in a cataclysmic explosion and threw its constituent material out into surrounding space. This created the messy formation we see here, with threads of red snaking amidst dark, turbulent clouds. The remnant is likely formed from the death of a white dwarf star, which grows by siphoning material from a stellar companion until it reaches a critical mass and then explodes. #

The Horsehead Nebula. Rising like a giant seahorse from turbulent waves of dust and gas in the constellation of Orion is the Horsehead Nebula, otherwise known as Barnard 33, stretching about 2.5 light-years across. This image shows the region in infrared light, which has longer wavelengths than visible light and can pierce through the dusty material that usually obscures the nebula’s inner regions. #