Location of candidate progenitor companion to Tycho's supernova [WFPC2]: A Hubble Space Telescope Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 image of a small section of sky containing a suspected runaway companion star to a titanic supernova explosion witnessed in the year 1572 by the great Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe. The star is like our Sun except several billion years older. It is moving through space at three times the speed of the other stars in its neighbourhood. Hubble's sharp view allowed for a measurement of the star's motion, based on images taken in 1999 and 2003. The image consists of a single greyscale Hubble exposure colorized with the help of data from Digitized Sky Survey 2.

Name: SN 1572A, Tycho's Supernova
Type: Milky Way : Nebula : Type : Supernova Remnant
Category: Nebulae
Constellation: Cassiopeia
Distance: 10000 light years
Release date: 27 October 2004, 20:00
Credit: NASA/ESA and P. Ruiz-Lapuente (University of Barcelona)

Expanding Bubble of Tycho's Supernova [Chandra]: This is a wide-field view of the region around Tycho's Supernova showing the expanding bubble of the supernova explosion. The colours in this Chandra X-Ray image of the hot bubble show different X-ray energies, with red, green, and blue representing low, medium, and high energies, respectively. (The image is cut off at the bottom because the southernmost region of the remnant fell outside the field of view of the Chandra camera.)

Name: SN 1572A, Tycho's Supernova
Type: Milky Way : Nebula : Type : Supernova Remnant
Category: Nebulae
Constellation: Cassiopeia
Distance: 10000 light years
Release date: 27 October 2004, 20:00
Credit: NASA/ESA, CXO and P. Ruiz-Lapuente (University of Barcelona)

Location of Tycho's Supernova in the sky (ground-based image): This area, two degrees across, is centred on the area where the famous Tycho's Supernova, also known as, SN 1572A, exploded in 1572. The region lies in the constellation of Cassiopeia in the northern sky. The image was composed from two exposure from the Digitized Survey 2. The red exposure is shown in blue and the infrared in red. In this optical and near-infrared image the supernova remnant itself is not visible.

Name: SN 1572A, Tycho's Supernova
Type: Milky Way : Nebula : Type : Supernova Remnant
Category: Nebulae
Constellation: Cassiopeia
Distance: 10000 light years
Release date: 27 October 2004, 20:00
Credit: NASA/ESA, Digitized Survey 2 and P. Ruiz-Lapuente (University of Barcelona)

Symphony of colours in the Tarantula: The Tarantula is situated 170,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) in the Southern sky and is clearly visible to the naked eye as a large milky patch. Astronomers believe that this smallish irregular galaxy is currently going through a violent period in its life. It is orbiting around the Milky Way and has had several close encounters with it. It is believed that the interaction with the Milky Way has caused an episode of energetic star formation - part of which is visible as the Tarantula Nebula. Just above the centre of the image there is a huge cluster of very hot stars called R136. The stars in R136 are also among the most massive stars we know. R136 is also a very young cluster, its oldest stars being "just" 5 million years old or so. Its smallest stars, however, are still forming, so astronomers observe R136 to try to understand the early stages of stellar evolution. Near the lower edge of the image we find the star cluster Hodge 301. Hodge 301 is almost 10 times older than R136. Some of the stars in Hodge 301 are so old that they have already exploded as supernovae. The shockwave from this explosion has compressed the gas in the Tarantula into the filaments and sheets that are seen around the cluster. This mosaic of the Tarantula Nebula consists of images from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) and was created by 23 year old amateur astronomer Danny LaCrue. The image was constructed by 15 individual exposures taken through three narrow-band filters allowing light from ionised oxygen (501 nm, shown as blue), hydrogen-alpha (656 nm, shown as green) and ionised sulphur (672 nm, shown as red). The exposure time for the individual WFPC2 images vary between 800 and 2800 seconds in each filter. The Hubble data have been superimposed onto images taken through matching narrow-band filters with the European Southern Observatory's New Technology Telescope at the La Silla Observatory, Chile. Additional image processing was done by the Hubble European Space Agency Information Centre.

Name: Hodge 301, R136, Tarantula Nebula
Type: Local Universe : Nebula
Category: NebulaeStar Clusters
Constellation: Dorado
Distance: 170000 light years
Release date: 15 December 2004, 10:00
Credit: ESA/NASA, ESO and Danny LaCrue

Hubble finds infant stars in neighbouring galaxy: The exquisite sharpness of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has plucked out an underlying population of infant stars embedded in the nebula NGC 346 that are still forming from gravitationally collapsing gas clouds. They have not yet ignited their hydrogen fuel to sustain nuclear fusion. The smallest of these infant stars is only half the mass of our Sun.

Name: NGC 346
Type: Local Universe : Star : Grouping : Cluster
Category: NebulaeStar Clusters
Constellation: Tucana
Distance: 200000 light years
Release date: 12 January 2005, 20:00
Credit: NASA, ESA and A. Nota (STScI/ESA)

Light continues to echo three years after stellar outburst: The Hubble Space Telescope's latest image of the star V838 Monocerotis (V838 Mon) reveals dramatic changes in the illumination of surrounding dusty cloud structures. The effect, called a light echo, has been unveiling never-before-seen dust patterns ever since the star suddenly brightened for several weeks in early 2002.

Name: V838 Mon
Type: Milky Way : Nebula
Category: Nebulae
Constellation: Monoceros
Release date: 3 February 2005, 15:00
Credit: NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI)