Comet Siding Spring: This is an unprocessed close up image of Comet Siding Spring. Comet Siding Spring is plunging toward the Sun along a roughly 1-million-year orbit. The comet, discovered in 2013, was within the radius of Jupiter's orbit when the Hubble Space Telescope photographed it on March 11, 2014. Hubble resolves two jets of dust coming from the solid icy nucleus. These persistent jets were first seen in Hubble pictures taken on Oct. 29, 2013. The feature should allow astronomers to measure the direction of the nucleus's pole, and hence, rotation axis. The comet will make its closest approach to our Sun on Oct. 25, 2014, at a distance of 130 million miles, well outside Earth's orbit. On its inbound leg, Comet Siding Spring will pass within 84,000 miles of Mars on Oct. 19, 2014, which is less than half the Moon's distance from Earth. The comet is not expected to become bright enough to be seen by the naked eye.

Name: C/2013 A1
Type: Solar System : Interplanetary Body : Comet
Category: Solar System
Release date: 31 March 2014, 13:57
Credit: NASA, ESA, and J.-Y. Li (Planetary Science Institute)

Comet Siding Spring: This is a processed close up image of Comet Siding Spring. Comet Siding Spring is plunging toward the Sun along a roughly 1-million-year orbit. The comet, discovered in 2013, was within the radius of Jupiter's orbit when the Hubble Space Telescope photographed it on March 11, 2014. Hubble resolves two jets of dust coming from the solid icy nucleus. These persistent jets were first seen in Hubble pictures taken on Oct. 29, 2013. The feature should allow astronomers to measure the direction of the nucleus's pole, and hence, rotation axis. The comet will make its closest approach to our Sun on Oct. 25, 2014, at a distance of 130 million miles, well outside Earth's orbit. On its inbound leg, Comet Siding Spring will pass within 84,000 miles of Mars on Oct. 19, 2014, which is less than half the Moon's distance from Earth. The comet is not expected to become bright enough to be seen by the naked eye.

Name: C/2013 A1
Type: Solar System : Interplanetary Body : Comet
Category: Solar System
Release date: 31 March 2014, 13:58
Credit: NASA, ESA, and J.-Y. Li (Planetary Science Institute)

Hubble stretches the stellar tape measure ten times further: This illustration shows the precision stellar distance measurement from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and how it has been extended 10 times further into our Milky Way galaxy than ever before. This greatly expands the volume of space accessible for refining the cosmic tape measure needed for measuring the size of the Universe. This type of measurement is based on trigonometric parallax, a geometric method commonly used by astronomers. NASA Press release

Type: Unspecified : Cosmology
Category: Illustrations
Release date: 10 April 2014, 17:17
Credit: Illustration Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI) Science Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Riess (JHU/STScI), S. Casertano (STScI/JHU), J. Anderson and J. MacKenty (STScI), and A. Filippenko (University of California, Berkeley)

Spiral galaxy NGC 1309: This image shows spiral galaxy NGC 1309. Astronomers have observed a rare type Iax supernova in the outskirts of the galaxy. The stellar explosion, known as Supernova 2012Z, s highlighted in the annotated version of this image.

Name: NGC 1309
Type: Local Universe : Star : Evolutionary Stage : Supernova
Category: Stars
Constellation: Eridanus
Distance: 100 million light years
Release date: 7 August 2014, 10:16
Credit: NASA, ESA, The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), and A. Riess (JHU/STScI)

Gravitational lensing by galaxy in cluster IRC 0218: This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image reveals the most distant cosmic lens yet found, a massive elliptical galaxy whose powerful gravity is magnifying the light from a faraway galaxy behind it. The giant elliptical is one of the red objects in the top left of the image, identified in the annotated version. The galaxy is seen as it appeared 9.6 billion years ago and is one of the brightest members in a distant cluster of galaxies, called IRC 0218. It is so massive that its enormous gravitational field deflects light passing through it, much as an optical lens bends light to form an image. This phenomenon, called gravitational lensing, magnifies, brightens, and distorts images from faraway objects that might otherwise be too faint to observe even with the largest telescopes. The image was made by combining visible-light observations from the Advanced Camera for Surveys and near-infrared exposures from the Wide Field Camera 3.

Name: IRC 0218
Type: Early Universe : Galaxy : Type : EllipticalEarly Universe : Galaxy : Type : Gravitationally LensedEarly Universe : Cosmology : Phenomenon : Lensing
Category: Galaxies
Constellation: Cetus
Distance: 10 billion light years
Release date: 4 August 2014, 09:12
Credit: NASA, ESA, K.-V. Tran (Texas A&M University), and K. Wong (Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy & Astrophysics)

IRC 0218 lensing feature: This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image reveals a close up view of the most distant cosmic lens yet found, a massive elliptical galaxy whose powerful gravity is magnifying the light from a faraway galaxy behind it. The giant elliptical is the red object in the centre. The galaxy is seen as it appeared 9.6 billion years ago and is one of the brightest members in a distant cluster of galaxies, called IRC 0218. The lighter-coloured blobs in the upper right and lower left are the distorted and magnified shapes of a more distant spiral galaxy behind the foreground elliptical. The giant elliptical is so massive that its enormous gravitational field deflects light passing through it, much as an optical lens bends light to form an image. This phenomenon, called gravitational lensing, magnifies, brightens, and distorts images from faraway objects that might otherwise be too faint to observe even with the largest telescopes.

Name: IRC 0218
Type: Early Universe : Galaxy : Type : EllipticalEarly Universe : Galaxy : Type : Gravitationally LensedEarly Universe : Cosmology : Phenomenon : Lensing
Category: Galaxies
Constellation: Cetus
Distance: 10 billion light years
Release date: 4 August 2014, 09:13
Credit: NASA, ESA, K.-V. Tran (Texas A&M University), and K. Wong (Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy & Astrophysics)