Animation still image 2 (artist's impression): Still image from the animation of the 1054 supernova that created the Crab Nebula. Note: artist's impression.

Name: Crab Nebula, Messier 1
Type: Solar System : Star : Evolutionary Stage : Supernova
Category: Stars
Distance: 6000 light years
Release date: 1 December 2005, 10:00
Credit: ESA/Hubble

Animation still image 3 (artist's impression): Still image from the animation of the 1054 supernova that created the Crab Nebula. Note: artist's impression.

Name: Crab Nebula, Messier 1
Type: Milky Way : Star : Evolutionary Stage : Supernova
Category: Stars
Distance: 6000 light years
Release date: 1 December 2005, 10:00
Credit: ESA/Hubble

Animation still image 4 (artist's impression): Still image from the animation of the 1054 supernova that created the Crab Nebula. Note: artist's impression.

Name: Crab Nebula, Messier 1
Type: Milky Way : Star : Evolutionary Stage : Supernova
Category: Stars
Distance: 6000 light years
Release date: 1 December 2005, 10:00
Credit: ESA/Hubble

Animation still image 5 (artist's impression): Still image from the animation of the 1054 supernova that created the Crab Nebula. Note: artist's impression.

Name: Crab Nebula, Messier 1
Type: Milky Way : Star : Evolutionary Stage : Supernova
Category: Stars
Distance: 6000 light years
Release date: 1 December 2005, 10:00
Credit: ESA/Hubble

Animation still image 6: Still image from the animation of the 1054 supernova that created the Crab Nebula. Note: artist's impression.

Name: Crab Nebula, Messier 1
Type: Milky Way : Nebula : Type : Supernova Remnant
Category: Nebulae
Distance: 6000 light years
Release date: 1 December 2005, 10:00
Credit: ESA/Hubble

An artist's impression of Sirius A and B: This picture is an artist's impression showing how the binary star system of Sirius A and its diminutive blue companion, Sirius B, might appear to an interstellar visitor. The large, bluish-white star Sirius A dominates the scene, while Sirius B is the small but very hot and blue white-dwarf star on the right. The two stars revolve around each other every 50 years. White dwarfs are the leftover remnants of stars similar to our Sun. The Sirius system, only 8.6 light-years from Earth, is the fifth closest stellar system known. Sirius B is faint because of its tiny size. Its diameter is only 7,500 miles (about 12 thousand kilometres), slightly smaller than the size of our Earth. The Sirius system is so close to Earth that most of the familiar constellations would have nearly the same appearance as in our own sky. In this rendition, we see in the background the three bright stars that make up the Summer Triangle: Altair, Deneb, and Vega. Altair is the white dot above Sirius A; Deneb is the dot to the upper right; and Vega lies below Sirius B. But there is one unfamiliar addition to the constellations: our own Sun is the second-magnitude star, shown as a small dot just below and to the right of Sirius A.

Name: Sirius A, Sirius B
Type: Milky Way : Star : Evolutionary Stage : White DwarfMilky Way : Star : Grouping : Binary
Category: Stars
Distance: 8 light years
Release date: 13 December 2005, 15:00
Credit: NASA, ESA and G. Bacon (STScI)

Ground-based image of Orion, Canis Minor and Canis major (ground-based image): This ground-based image was taken by Japanese amateur astronomer Akira Fujii and shows the constellations Orion, Canis Minor and Canis major.

Type: Milky Way : Sky Phenomenon : Night Sky : Constellation
Category: Stars
Release date: 13 December 2005, 15:00
Credit: Akira Fujii

Sirius (ground-based image): The image shows an overview of Sirius B's surroundings and was composed from images from the Digitized Sky Survey 2. The field of view is 4.5› x 4.7›.

Name: Sirius B
Type: Milky Way : Star : Evolutionary Stage : White DwarfMilky Way : Star : Grouping : Binary
Category: Stars
Constellation: Canis Major
Release date: 13 December 2005, 15:00
Credit: ESA/Hubble and Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgements: Davide De Martin (ESA/Hubble )

Ground-based image of Sirius (ground-based image): This ground-based image was taken by Japanese amateur astronomer Akira Fujii and shows a close-up of Sirius.

Name: Sirius
Type: Milky Way : Star : Evolutionary Stage : Main Sequence
Category: Stars
Constellation: Canis Major
Distance: 8 light years
Release date: 13 December 2005, 15:00
Credit: Akira Fujii

Hubble's sharpest view of the Orion Nebula: This dramatic image offers a peek inside a cavern of roiling dust and gas where thousands of stars are forming. The image, taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) aboard NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, represents the sharpest view ever taken of this region, called the Orion Nebula. More than 3,000 stars of various sizes appear in this image. Some of them have never been seen in visible light. These stars reside in a dramatic dust-and-gas landscape of plateaus, mountains, and valleys that are reminiscent of the Grand Canyon. The Orion Nebula is a picture book of star formation, from the massive, young stars that are shaping the nebula to the pillars of dense gas that may be the homes of budding stars. The bright central region is the home of the four heftiest stars in the nebula. The stars are called the Trapezium because they are arranged in a trapezoid pattern. Ultraviolet light unleashed by these stars is carving a cavity in the nebula and disrupting the growth of hundreds of smaller stars. Located near the Trapezium stars are stars still young enough to have disks of material encircling them. These disks are called protoplanetary disks or "proplyds" and are too small to see clearly in this image. The disks are the building blocks of solar systems. The bright glow at upper left is from M43, a small region being shaped by a massive, young star's ultraviolet light. Astronomers call the region a miniature Orion Nebula because only one star is sculpting the landscape. The Orion Nebula has four such stars. Next to M43 are dense, dark pillars of dust and gas that point toward the Trapezium. These pillars are resisting erosion from the Trapezium's intense ultraviolet light. The glowing region on the right reveals arcs and bubbles formed when stellar winds - streams of charged particles ejected from the Trapezium stars - collide with material. The faint red stars near the bottom are the myriad brown dwarfs that Hubble spied for the first time in the nebula in visible light. Sometimes called "failed stars," brown dwarfs are cool objects that are too small to be ordinary stars because they cannot sustain nuclear fusion in their cores the way our Sun does. The dark red column, below, left, shows an illuminated edge of the cavity wall. The Orion Nebula is 1,500 light-years away, the nearest star-forming region to Earth. Astronomers used 520 Hubble images, taken in five colours, to make this picture. They also added ground-based photos to fill out the nebula. The ACS mosaic covers approximately the apparent angular size of the full moon. The Orion observations were taken between 2004 and 2005.

Name: Messier 42, Messier 43, Orion Nebula
Type: Milky Way : Nebula : Type : Star FormationMilky Way : Nebula : Appearance : Emission : H II Region
Category: Nebulae
Constellation: Orion
Distance: 1400 light years
Release date: 11 January 2006, 16:00
Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Robberto ( Space Telescope Science Institute/ESA) and the Hubble Space Telescope Orion Treasury Project Team