Hubble's Astounding Photos

COSMIC FOUNTAIN
photo by NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team
To commemorate the Hubble Space Telescope's 19 years of historic, trailblazing science, the orbiting telescope has photographed a peculiar system of galaxies known as Arp 194. This interacting group contains several galaxies, along with a "cosmic fountain" of stars, gas, and dust that stretches over 100,000 light-years. The impressive blue stream of material is a "fountain" containing complexes of super star clusters.



PLANETARY NEBULAE
photo by NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team
This image shows the colorful "last hurrah" of a star like our Sun. The star is ending its life by casting off its outer layers of gas, which formed a cocoon around the star's remaining core. Ultraviolet light from the dying star then makes the material glow. The burned-out star, called a white dwarf, appears as a white dot in the center. Our Milky Way galaxy is littered with these stellar relics, called planetary nebulae.


SPIRAL GALAXY
photo by NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team
The graceful, winding arms of the majestic spiral galaxy M51 appear like a grand spiral staircase sweeping through space. They are actually long lanes of stars and gas laced with dust.


EAGLE NEBULA
photo by NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team
Appearing like a winged fairytale creature poised on a pedestal, this object is actually a billowing tower of cold gas and dust rising from a stellar nursery called the Eagle Nebula. The soaring tower is 9.5 light-years, or about 57 trillion miles, high, about twice the distance from our Sun to the next nearest star.


STARRY NIGHT
photo by NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team
This image resembling Vincent van Gogh's painting, Starry Night, is Hubble's latest view of an expanding halo of light around a distant star, named V838 Monocerotis. The illumination of interstellar dust comes from the red supergiant star at the middle of the image, which gave off a flashbulb-like pulse of light two years ago. The star is located about 20,000 light-years away from Earth in the direction of the constellation Monoceros, placing it at the outer edge of our Milky Way galaxy.

Those are my favorites, see more here:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-05-17/hubbles-astounding-photos/

Those are very cool, but at the same time they kinda freak me out a little. I think it's because they make me think about how big the universe really is and how tiny we are.

Yeah, the scale of things is really more than I can fathom. Like the height of that tower being TWICE the distance from our sun to the next star. Wtf?

I prefer not to ponder it.