The Hubble Space Telescope has snapped a panoramic portrait of a vast, sculpted landscape of gas and dust where thousands of stars are being born. This fertile star-forming region, called the 30 Doradus Nebula has the most spectacular cluster of massive stars in our cosmic neighborhood of about 25 galaxies.

Photo Platform: Hubble Space Telescope
Date Released: July 26, 2001

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The Hubble Space Telescope has snapped a panoramic portrait of a vast, sculpted landscape of gas and dust where thousands of stars are being born. This fertile star-forming region, called the 30 Doradus Nebula has the most spectacular cluster of massive stars in our cosmic neighborhood of about 25 galaxies.

Photo Platform: Hubble Space Telescope
Date Released: July 26, 2001

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In the beginning of the 1946 holiday film classic "It's a Wonderful Life," angelic figures take on the form of a famous group of compact galaxies known as Stephan's Quintet. In reality, these galaxies aren't so heavenly.

Photo Platform: Hubble Space Telescope
Date Released: July 19, 2001

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This animation studies the effects of multiple galaxies colliding over time. Astronomers use such simulations to develop theories about the origin of today's galaxies.

Photo Platform: Hubble Space Telescope
Date Released: July 19, 2001

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Animation depicts the wrenching processes unleashed when two galaxies collide. This animation is a rendering of a data simulation that astronomers use to study interacting and colliding galaxies.

Photo Platform: Hubble Space Telescope
Date Released: July 19, 2001

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This ultraviolet image of M81 was obtained by the Optical Monitor (OM) on XMM-Newton in April 2001. The image is formed from three 1000 s exposures taken with different ultraviolet filters, centred on approximately 2000, 2300 and 2800 angstroms respectively. It covers a region one quarter of a degree square and frames the M81 galaxy which is at least 22 000 light-years across.

Photo Platform: XMM-Newton
Date Released: June 15, 2001

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In this view of the center of the magnificent barred spiral galaxy NGC 1512, NASA Hubble Space Telescope’s broad spectral vision reveals the galaxy at all wavelengths from ultraviolet to infrared. The colors (which indicate differences in light intensity) map where newly born star clusters exist in both "dusty" and "clean" regions of the galaxy.

Photo Platform: Hubble
Date Released: May 31, 2001

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A small area in the direction of the heavily obscured centre of radio galaxy Centaurus A.

Photo Platform: ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT)
Date Released: March 8, 2001

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This image was obtained with the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrograph (NICMOS) onboard the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. It shows the region around the core of the barred spiral galaxy NGC 2903.

Photo Platform: Hubble
Date Released: February 27, 2001

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This ground-based overview image of NGC 2903 was taken with a 40 cm telescope (16 inch), and shows why this spiral galaxy is a favourite among amateur astronomers.

Photo Platform: Hubble
Date Released: February 27, 2001

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This colourful image, obtained by the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 WFPC2) onboard the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, shows a close-up of the barred spiral galaxy NGC 2903. The galaxy bears a close resemblance to our Milky Way, which is also believed to be a barred spiral galaxy.

Photo Platform: Hubble
Date Released: February 27, 2001

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The Hubble telescope has snapped this remarkable view of a perfectly "edge-on" galaxy, NGC 4013. This new Hubble picture reveals with exquisite detail huge clouds of dust and gas extending along, as well as far above, the galaxy's main disk. NGC 4013 is a spiral galaxy, similar to our Milky Way, lying some 55 million light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Ursa Major.

Photo Platform: Hubble
Date Released: March 1, 2001

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This Chandra image shows hot gas enveloping the extremely distant galaxy known as 3C294. Astronomers believe this is the most distant cluster of galaxies ever detected in X-rays, capturing it when the universe was only 20 percent of its current age. The existence of such a faraway cluster may have important implications for how the universe evolved.

Photo Platform: Chandra
Date Released: February 20, 2001

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Galaxies and black holes are so intimately connected that it is almost impossible to find one without the other, according to University of Michigan astronomer Douglas Richstone.

Photo Platform: Hubble Space Telescope
Date Released: February 16, 2001

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Subaru Telescope has successfully taken a sharp and deep infrared image of the star-forming region, S106. In addition, many objects with masses less than that of an ordinary star have been discovered in this region. S106 is at a distance of approximately 2000 light-years from the Earth. There is a large massive star called IRS4 (Infrared Source 4) at the center of S106

Photo Platform: Subaru Telescope
Date Released: February 13, 2001

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A student astronomer has discovered evidence of a vast collision between two giant clusters of galaxies. Using CSIRO's Australia Telescope, PhD student Melanie Johnston-Hollitt of the University of Adelaide has found 'wreckage' indicating that two giant clusters of galaxies have collided and merged.The finding changes astronomers' views of how clusters and individual galaxies evolve.

Photo Platform:
Date Released: February 6, 2001

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Using radio telescopes in the United States and Europe, astronomers have made the most detailed images ever of Hydrogen gas in a spiral galaxy other than the Milky Way.

Photo Platform: NRAO
Date Released: January 9, 2001

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Astronomers are using these three Hubble telescope images of nearby galaxies to help tackle the question of why their distant relatives have such odd shapes, appearing markedly different from the typical "ellipticals" and "spirals" seen in the nearby universe.

Photo Platform: Hubble
Date Released: January 11, 2001

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Astronomers are using these three Hubble telescope images of nearby galaxies to help tackle the question of why their distant relatives have such odd shapes, appearing markedly different from the typical "ellipticals" and "spirals" seen in the nearby universe.

Photo Platform: Hubble
Date Released: January 11, 2001

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Astronomers are using these three Hubble telescope images of nearby galaxies to help tackle the question of why their distant relatives have such odd shapes, appearing markedly different from the typical "ellipticals" and "spirals" seen in the nearby universe.

Photo Platform: Hubble
Date Released: January 11, 2001

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This visible-light picture, taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, reveals an intergalactic "pipeline" of material flowing between two battered galaxies that bumped into each other about 100 million years ago.

Photo Platform: Hubble
Date Released: January 9, 2001

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Four views of the Andromeda spiral galaxy (M31) at increasing contrast levels (top to bottom), presented to the American Astronomical Society meeting in San Diego, CA on January 9, 2001.

Photo Platform: UCSC
Date Released: January 9, 2001

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This image is a photograph of the galaxy field associated with the large quasar group. The field was observed using the Big Throughput Camera (BTC) on the National Science Foundation's 4-meter (159 inch) Blanco telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile during April 1998.

Photo Platform: NOAO
Date Released: January 8, 2001

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What appears as a bird's head, leaning over to snatch up a tasty meal, is a striking example of a galaxy collision in NGC 6745. A large spiral galaxy, with its nucleus still intact, peers at the smaller passing galaxy (nearly out of the field of view at lower right), while a bright blue beak and bright whitish-blue top feathers show the distinct path taken during the smaller galaxy's journey.

Photo Platform: Hubble
Date Released: November 2, 2000

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Scanning the heavens for the first time since the successful December 1999 servicing mission, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has imaged a giant, cosmic magnifying glass, a massive cluster of galaxies called Abell 2218. This "hefty" cluster resides in the constellation Draco, some 2 billion light-years from Earth.

Photo Platform: Hubble
Date Released: January 24, 2000

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Resembling a swirling witch's cauldron of glowing vapors, the black hole-powered core of a nearby active galaxy appears in this colorful NASA Hubble Space Telescope image. The galaxy lies 13 million light-years away in the southern constellation Circinus.

Photo Platform: Hubble
Date Released: November 30, 2000

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This Hubble Space Telescope image reveals the faint host galaxy that a bright quasar dwells within. The wealth of new detail in this picture helps solve a three-decade old mystery about the true nature of quasars, the most distant and energetic objects in the universe.

Photo Platform: Hubble
Date Released: June 14, 1995

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The core of the grand design spiral galaxy M100, as imaged by Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 in its high resolution channel. The WFPC-2 contains modified optics that correct for Hubble's previously blurry vision, allowing the telescope for the first time to cleanly resolve faint structure as small as 30 light-years across in a galaxy which is tens of millions of light years away.

Photo Platform: Hubble
Date Released: July 7, 1995

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