Wonders of the Cosmos

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Eye of heaven - Also called the 'Eye of God'
This celestial object, with the scientific name MyCn18, looks like an eerie green eye staring out from two intersecting rings. But it's actually an intricately shaped "hourglass" nebula with a star at its center.

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Stormy weather
Temperature differences within interstellar clouds of gas and dust can result in structures reminiscent of Earth's tornadoes. Here are some twisters in the heart of the Lagoon Nebula.

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Surrealistic Saturn
A false-color image shows infrared light reflected from the planet Saturn. The different hues help scientists discern different levels of the planet's thick atmosphere. Two of Saturn's moons - Dione and Tethys - are visible as specks on the image.

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Cosmic Horsehead
The Horsehead Nebula is one of the most photographed objects in the sky. The Hubble Space Telescope took a close-up look at this heavenly icon, revealing the cloud's intricate structure. This view of the horse's head was released April 24, 2001, to celebrate the observatory's 11th anniversary. Hubble was launched by the shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990.

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Light up the night
Like lanterns in a cavern, scores of hot stars light up the gaseous walls of the nebula NGC 604. The nebula is a prime area for starbirth in an arm of the spiral galaxy M33.

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Ballooning star
Eta Carinae was the site of a giant outburst observed from Earth about 150 years ago, when it became one of the brightest stars in the southern sky. The star survived the explosion, which produced two billowing clouds of gas and dust.

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Pillars of creation
Columns of cool hydrogen gas in the Eagle Nebula serve as the incubators for new stars - which look like tiny bubbles within the dark pillars.

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Glowing dust
This dramatic image offers a peek inside a cavern of roiling dust and gas where thousands of stars are forming. The image, taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys aboard the Hubble Space Telescope, represents the sharpest view ever taken of this region, called the Orion Nebula.

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A brilliant white
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope trained its eye on one of the universe's most stately and photogenic galaxies, the Sombrero galaxy with the space telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys , in May-June 2003 . The image of the galaxy's hallmark brilliant white, bulbous core is encircled by the thick dust lanes comprising the spiral structure of the galaxy.

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A starry night
This image bears remarkable similarities to the Vincent van Gogh work, "Starry Night" complete with never-before-seen spirals of dust swirling across trillions of kilometres of interstellar space. The Advanced Camera for Surveys is Hubble's latest view of an expanding halo of light around a distant star, named V838 Monocerotis (V838 Mon). V838 Mon is located about 20,000 light-years away from Earth in the direction of the constellation Monoceros, placing the star at the outer edge of our Milky Way galaxy.