| Diffuse masses of interstellar dust or gas or both, visible as luminous patches or areas of darkness depending on the way the mass absorbs or reflects incident radiation. |
Seeing the awesome images from the Hubble telescope leaves no doubt that the Heavens display God's artwork. A Devine Hand surely developed these celestial finger paintings. They are thousands of light-years away, ageless, and stunningly beautiful. Click images for more photos and information
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The Boomerang Nebula Located about 5,000 light-years from Earth in the direction of the Southern constellation Centaurus. Submillimeter radio measurements made in 1995 show the deep interior of the nebula to have a temperature of only one degree Kelvin above absolute zero, with absolute zero equal to nearly -460 degrees Fahrenheit. This makes the inner regions of the Boomerang Nebula one of the coldest known places in the universe.
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The Bug Nebula
One of the brightest and most extreme planetary nebulae known. The fiery, dying star at its center is shrouded by a blanket of icy hailstones. Image shows impressive walls of compressed gas, laced with trailing strands and bubbling outflows. |
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The Catseye Nebula This nebula looks like the penetrating eye of the disembodied sorcerer Sauron from the film adaptation of "The Lord of the Rings." The nebula, formally cataloged NGC 6543, is every bit as inscrutable as the J.R.R. Tolkien phantom character. Though the Cat's Eye Nebula was one of the first planetary nebulae to be discovered, it is one of the most complex such nebulae seen in space. |
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The Crab Nebula The Crab Nebula is a six-light-year-wide expanding remnant of a star's supernova explosion. Japanese and Chinese astronomers recorded this violent event nearly 1,000 years ago in 1054, as did, almost certainly, Native Americans. This composite image was assembled from 24 individual exposures taken with the NASA Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 in October 1999, January 2000, and December 2000. It is one of the largest images taken by Hubble and is the highest resolution image ever made of the entire Crab Nebula. |
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The Helix Nebula At a distance of 650 light-years, the Helix is one of the nearest planetary nebulae to Earth.The composite picture is a seamless blend of ultra-sharp NASA Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Advanced Camera for Surveys images combined with the wide view of the Mosaic Camera on the National Science Foundation's 0.9-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory, part of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, near Tucson, Ariz. Astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) assembled the images into a mosaic. The mosaic was blended with a wider photograph taken by the Mosaic Camera. |
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The Trifid Nebula Three huge intersecting dark lanes of interstellar dust make the Trifid Nebula one of the most recognizable and striking star birth regions in the night sky. The dust, silhouetted against glowing gas and illuminated by starlight, cradles the bright stars at the heart of the Trifid Nebula. This nebula, also known as Messier 20 and NGC 6514, lies within our own Milky Way Galaxy about 9,000 light-years (2,700 parsecs) from Earth, in the constellation Sagittarius.
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