Hubble reveals galactic drama [image 6]: A galactic brawl. A close encounter with a spiral galaxy. Blue wisps of galaxies. These close-up snapshots of galaxies in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field reveal the drama of galactic life. The galaxies in this panel were plucked from a harvest of nearly 10,000 galaxies in the Ultra Deep Field, the deepest visible-light image of the cosmos. The Ultra Deep Field observations, taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys, represent a narrow, "deep" view of the cosmos. Peering into the Ultra Deep Field is like looking through a 2.5 metre-long soda straw. In ground-based images, the patch of sky in which the galaxies reside (just one-tenth the diameter of the full Moon) is largely empty. Located in the constellation Fornax, the region is so empty, in fact, that only a handful of stars within the Milky Way galaxy can be seen in the image. In this image, blue and green correspond to colours that can be seen by the human eye, such as hot, young, blue stars and the glow of Sun-like stars in the disks of galaxies. Red represents near-infrared light, which is invisible to the human eye, such as the red glow of dust-enshrouded galaxies. The image required 800 exposures taken over the course of 400 Hubble orbits around Earth. The total amount of exposure time was 11.3 days, taken between Sept. 24, 2003 and Jan. 16, 2004.

Name: Hubble Ultra Deep Field, HUDF
Type: Early Universe : Galaxy : Grouping : Cluster
Category: Galaxies
Constellation: Fornax
Release date: 9 March 2004, 15:30
Credit: NASA, ESA, and S. Beckwith (STScI) and the HUDF Team

Demise in ice and fire: The Bug Nebula, NGC 6302, is one of the brightest and most extreme planetary nebulae known. At its centre lies a superhot, dying star smothered in a blanket of hailstones. A new Hubble image reveals fresh detail in the wings of this cosmic butterfly. Most planetary nebulae are distinctive, but few are as extreme as NGC 6302, also known as the Bug Nebula. The fiery, dying star at its centre is shrouded by a blanket of icy hailstones.

Name: Bug Nebula, NGC 6302
Type: Milky Way : Nebula : Type : Planetary
Category: Nebulae
Constellation: Scorpius
Distance: 4000 light years
Release date: 29 April 2004, 10:00
Credit: ESA/NASA and Albert Zijlstra

NGC 6302 (ground-based): The Bug Nebula, NGC 6302, here imaged with the 3.6 metre telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory by astronomer Romano L.M. Corradi.

Name: Bug Nebula, NGC 6302
Type: Milky Way : Nebula : Type : Planetary
Category: Nebulae
Constellation: Scorpius
Distance: 4000 light years
Release date: 29 April 2004, 10:00
Credit: ESA/NASA & Romano Corradi (ING)

The remarkable Red Rectangle: Stairway to heaven?: This image, taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, reveals startling new details of one of the most unusual nebulae known in our Galaxy. Catalogued as HD 44179, this nebula is more commonly called the "Red Rectangle" because of its unique shape and colour as seen with ground-based telescopes. Hubble has revealed a wealth of new features in the Red Rectangle that cannot be seen by ground-based telescopes looking through the Earth's turbulent atmosphere. Details of the Hubble study were published in the April 2004 issue of The Astronomical Journal.

Name: HD 44179, Red Rectangle
Type: Milky Way : Nebula : Type : Planetary
Category: Nebulae
Constellation: Monoceros
Distance: 2300 light years
Release date: 11 May 2004, 15:00
Credit: NASA/ESA, Hans Van Winckel (Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium) and Martin Cohen (University of California, USA)

Red Rectangle overview image 1  (ground-based image): This is a ground-based view of the sky around the Red Rectangle. The image spans a square of one degree and was constructed from three images from the Digitized Sky Survey 2 taken in Blue, Infrared and Red (shown as blue, green and red respectively). Note that the HST picture only shows the innermost part of the nebula.

Name: HD 44179, Red Rectangle
Type: Milky Way : Nebula
Category: Nebulae
Constellation: Monoceros
Distance: 2300 light years
Release date: 11 May 2004, 15:00
Credit: ESA and Digitized Sky Survey 2

Red Rectangle overview image 2 [ground-based]: This ground-based image was taken with the European Southern Observatory's New Technology Telescope at La Silla Observatory. The image is constructed from three exposures through a blue filter, Hydrogen-alpha filter and a red filter. Note that the HST picture only shows the innermost part of the nebula.

Name: HD 44179, Red Rectangle
Type: Milky Way : Nebula
Category: Nebulae
Constellation: Monoceros
Distance: 2300 light years
Release date: 11 May 2004, 15:00
Credit: ESA, ESO and Hans van Winckel (Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium)

Hubble studies sequences of star formation in neighbouring galaxy: The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captures the iridescent tapestry of star birth in a neighbouring galaxy in this panoramic view of glowing gas, dark dust clouds, and young, hot stars. The star-forming region, catalogued as N11B lies in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), located only 160,000 light-years from Earth. With its high resolution, the Hubble Space Telescope is able to view details of star formation in the LMC as easily as ground-based telescopes are able to observe stellar formation within our own Milky Way galaxy. Our neighbourhood galaxy the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) lies in the Constellation of Dorado and is sprinkled with a number of regions harbouring recent and ongoing star formation. One of these star-forming region, N11B, is shown in this Hubble image. It is a subregion within a larger area of star formation called N11. N11 is the second largest star-forming region in LMC. It is only surpassed in the size and activity by "the king of stellar nurseries", 30 Doradus, located at the opposite side of LMC.

Name: LHA 120-N 11B, N11B
Type: Local Universe : Nebula : Type : Star Formation
Category: Nebulae
Constellation: Dorado
Distance: 150000 light years
Release date: 1 July 2004, 15:00
Credit: NASA/ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI/HEIC)