Nebula N 81: NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has peered deep into a neighboring galaxy to reveal details of the formation of new stars. Hubble's target was a newborn star cluster within the Small Magellanic Cloud, a small galaxy that is a satellite of our own Milky Way. The new images show young, brilliant stars cradled within a nebula, or glowing cloud of gas, cataloged as N 81.

Name: N 81, Small Magellanic Cloud
Type: Local Universe : Nebula : Type : Star Formation
Category: Nebulae
Constellation: Tucana
Distance: 200000 light years
Release date: 5 October 2000, 06:00
Credit: NASA/ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

City of Stars - 47 Tucanae (WFPC-2 Image): This image shows the Hubble telescope's close-up look at a swarm of 35, 000 stars near the cluster's central region. The stars are tightly packed together: They are much closer together than our Sun and its closest stars. The picture, taken by the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, depicts the stars' natural colours and tells scientists about their composition and age. For example, the red stars denote bright red giants nearing the end of their lives; the more common yellow stars are similar to our middle-aged Sun.

Name: 47 Tuc, NGC 104
Type: Milky Way : Star : Grouping : Cluster : Globular
Category: Star Clusters
Constellation: Tucana
Distance: 15000 light years
Release date: 31 October 2000, 07:00
Credit: Ron Gilliland ( Space Telescope Science Institute) and NASA/ESA

City of Stars - 47 Tucanae (Ground-Based Image): The picture at left, taken by a terrestrial telescope, shows most of the cluster, a tightly packed group of middle-aged stars held together by mutual gravitational attraction. The box near the center represents a Hubble Space Telescope segment, which shows approximately 35, 000 stars.

Name: 47 Tucanae, NGC 104
Type: Milky Way : Star : Grouping : Cluster : Globular
Category: Star Clusters
Constellation: Tucana
Distance: 15000 light years
Release date: 31 October 2000, 07:00
Credit: David Malin (Anglo-Australian Observatory).

Galaxy collision in NGC 6745: What appears as a bird's head, leaning over to snatch up a tasty meal, is a striking example of a galaxy collision in NGC 6745. A large spiral galaxy, with its nucleus still intact, peers at the smaller passing galaxy (nearly out of the field of view at lower right), while a bright blue beak and bright whitish-blue top feathers show the distinct path taken during the smaller galaxy's journey. These galaxies did not merely interact gravitationally as they passed one another, they actually collided.

Name: IRAS 19000+4040, NGC 6745
Type: Local Universe : Galaxy : Type : Interacting
Category: Galaxies
Constellation: Lyra
Distance: 200 million light years
Release date: 2 November 2000, 07:00
Credit: Roger Lynds (KPNO/NOAO), NASA/ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA).

The Motion of RX J185635-3754: This photograph is the sum of three Hubble Space Telescope images. North is down, east is to the right. All stars line up in this composite picture, except the neutron star, which moves across the image in a direction 10 degrees south of east. The three images of the neutron star are labeled by date. The proper motion is 1/3 of a second of arc per year.

Name: RX J185635-3754
Type: Milky Way : Star : Evolutionary Stage : Neutron Star
Category: Stars
Distance: 400 light years
Release date: 9 November 2000, 19:00
Credit: F.M. Walter (State University of New York at Stony Brook) and NASA/ESA

Ghostly reflections in the Pleiades: This image shows a dark interstellar cloud ravaged by the passage of Merope, one of the brightest stars in the Pleiades star cluster. Just as a torch beam bounces off the wall of a cave, the star is reflecting light from the surface of pitch-black clouds of cold gas laced with dust. As the nebula approaches Merope, the strong starlight shining on the dust decelerates the dust particles. The nebula is drifting through the cluster at a relative speed of roughly 11 kilometres per second. The Hubble Space Telescope has caught the eerie, wispy tendrils of a dark interstellar cloud being destroyed by the passage of one of the brightest stars in the Pleiades star cluster. Like a flashlight beam shining off the wall of a cave, the star is reflecting light off the surface of pitch black clouds of cold gas laced with dust. These are called reflection nebulae.

Name: Barnard's Merope Nebula, Pleiades
Type: Milky Way : Star : Grouping : ClusterMilky Way : Nebula : Appearance : Dark
Category: Nebulae
Constellation: Taurus
Distance: 450 light years
Release date: 6 December 2000, 07:00
Credit: NASA/ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), George Herbig and Theodore Simon (University of Hawaii).

Active galaxy Circinus: Resembling a swirling witch's cauldron of glowing vapors, the black hole-powered core of a nearby active galaxy appears in this colorful NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image. The galaxy lies 13 million light-years away in the southern constellation Circinus. This galaxy is designated a type 2 Seyfert, a class of mostly spiral galaxies that have compact centers and are believed to contain massive black holes. Seyfert galaxies are themselves part of a larger class of objects called Active Galactic Nuclei or AGN. AGN have the ability to remove gas from the centers of their galaxies by blowing it out into space at phenomenal speeds. Astronomers studying the Circinus galaxy are seeing evidence of a powerful AGN at the center of this galaxy as well.

Name: Circinus, IRAS 14092-6506
Type: Local Universe : Galaxy : Activity : AGN : Seyfert
Category: Galaxies
Constellation: Circinus
Release date: 30 November 2000, 07:00
Credit: Andrew S. Wilson (University of Maryland); Patrick L. Shopbell (Caltech); Chris Simpson (Subaru Telescope); Thaisa Storchi-Bergmann and F. K. B. Barbosa (UFRGS, Brazil); and Martin J. Ward (University of Leicester, U.K.) and NASA/ESA

Hubble-X in galaxy NGC 6822: The saying 'X' marks the spot holds true in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope (HST) image where Hubble-X marks the location of a dramatic burst of star formation, very much like the Orion Nebula in our Milky Way galaxy, but on a vastly greater scale. Hubble-X is a glowing gas cloud, one of the most active star-forming regions within galaxy NGC 6822. The name Hubble-X does not refer to the shape of the gas cloud, but rather is derived from a catalog of objects in this particular galaxy.

Name: Barnard's Galaxy, Hubble-X, NGC 6822
Type: Local Universe : Galaxy : Type : BarredLocal Universe : Nebula : Type : Star FormationLocal Universe : Galaxy : Type : Irregular
Category: Galaxies
Constellation: Sagittarius
Distance: 2 million light years
Release date: 4 January 2001, 07:00
Credit: NASA/ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Intergalactic pipeline: This visible-light picture, taken by the Hubble telescope, reveals an intergalactic 'pipeline' of material flowing between two battered galaxies that bumped into each other about 100 million years ago. The pipeline [the dark string of matter] begins in NGC 1410 [the galaxy at left], crosses over 20, 000 light-years of intergalactic space, and wraps around NGC 1409 [the companion galaxy at right] like a ribbon around a package. The galaxies reside about 300 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Taurus.

Name: IRAS 03386-0127, NGC 1409, NGC 1410
Type: Local Universe : Galaxy : Type : Interacting
Category: Galaxies
Constellation: Taurus
Release date: 9 January 2001, 18:30
Credit: William C. Keel (University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa) and NASA/ESA