From afar, the whole thing looks like an Eagle. A closer look at the Eagle Nebula, however, shows the bright region is actually a window into the center of a larger dark shell of dust.
At the heart of the Orion Nebula, are four hot, massive stars known as the Trapezium. Gathered within a region about 1.5 light-years in radius, they dominate the core of the dense Orion Nebula Star Cluster.
These unusual blobs found in the Carina nebula, some of which are seen floating on the upper right, might best be described as evaporating. Ironically the blobs, otherwise known as dark molecular clouds, frequently create in their midst the very stars that later destroy them.
Nebula IC 1396 mixes glowing cosmic gas and dark dust clouds in constellation of Cepheus.
NGC 6888, also known as the Crescent Nebula, is a cosmic bubble about 25 light-years across, blown by winds from its central, bright, massive star. NASA photo of the day 2012 August 16.
HST Orion nebula image composited with a Spitzer image.
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured an unprecedented look at the Orion Nebula. This turbulent star formation region is one of astronomy’s most
dramatic and photogenic celestial objects.
This is a Spitzer image of the Orion nebula in the infrared overlaid with XMM-Newton X-ray data in blue.
Lying about 1350 light-years from Earth, an image of the Orion Nebula (Messier 42).
Orion Nebula picture from images taken by Hubble and Spitzer telescopes.
The Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Explorer, or WISE. The Rho Ophiuchi cloud (named after a bright star in the region) is found rising above the plane of the Milky Way in the night sky, bordering the constellations Ophiuchus and Scorpius.
The sky near Antares and Rho Ophiuchi. These star clouds are even more colorful than humans can see, emitting light across the electromagnetic spectrum.
Taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, is located about 5500 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius. The image, roughly 3 light-years across, was taken May 29-30, 1999. The colors in the image represent various gases. Red represents sulfur; green, hydrogen; and blue, oxygen.
Camelopardalis, or U Cam for short, is a star nearing the end of its life. As it begins to run low on fuel, it is becoming unstable. Every few thousand years, it coughs out a nearly spherical shell of gas as a layer of helium around its core begins to fuse. The gas ejected in the star’s latest eruption is clearly visible in this picture as a faint bubble of gas surrounding the star.
U Cam is an example of a carbon star. This is a rare type of star whose atmosphere contains more carbon than oxygen. Due to its low surface gravity, typically as much as half of the total mass of a carbon star may be lost by way of powerful stellar winds.
This view takes in a vast cloud of gas and dust where new stars are being born. Three familiar nebulae are visible in the central region: the Flame nebula, the Horsehead nebula, and NGC 2023. The Flame is the brightest and largest in the image. It is being lit up by a star inside it that is 20 times the mass of the sun and would be as bright to our eyes as the other stars in Orion’s belt if it weren’t for all the surrounding dust, which makes it appear 4 billion times dimmer than it really is.
