A Grand View of the Birth of 'Hefty' Stars - 30 Doradus Nebula Montage: This picture, taken in visible light with the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2(WFPC2), represents a sweeping view of the 30 Doradus Nebula. But Hubble's infrared camera - the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) - has probed deeper into smaller regions of this nebula to unveil the stormy birth of massive stars. The montages of images in the upper left and upper right represent this deeper view. Each square in the montages is 15.5 light-years (19 arcseconds) across.

Name: 30 Doradus Nebula, Tarantula Nebula
Type: Milky Way : Galaxy
Category: Nebulae
Constellation: Dorado
Release date: 29 September 1999, 07:00
Credit: NASA/ESA/Nolan Walborn ( Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.) and Rodolfo Barba (La Plata Observatory, La Plata, Argentina)

A Grand View of the Birth of 'Hefty' Stars - 30 Doradus Nebula Montage: This picture, taken in visible light with the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2(WFPC2), represents a sweeping view of the 30 Doradus Nebula. But Hubble's infrared camera - the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) - has probed deeper into smaller regions of this nebula to unveil the stormy birth of massive stars. The montages of images in the upper left and upper right represent this deeper view. Each square in the montages is 15.5 light-years (19 arcseconds) across.

Name: 30 Doradus Nebula, Tarantula Nebula
Type: Local Universe : Nebula : Type : Star Formation
Category: Nebulae
Constellation: Dorado
Distance: 170000 light years
Release date: 29 September 1999, 07:00
Credit: NASA/ESA/Nolan Walborn ( Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.) and Rodolfo Barba (La Plata Observatory, La Plata, Argentina)

A Grand View of the Birth of 'Hefty' Stars - 30 Doradus Nebula Montage: This picture, taken in visible light with the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2(WFPC2), represents a sweeping view of the 30 Doradus Nebula. But Hubble's infrared camera - the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) - has probed deeper into smaller regions of this nebula to unveil the stormy birth of massive stars. The montages of images in the upper left and upper right represent this deeper view. Each square in the montages is 15.5 light-years (19 arcseconds) across.

Name: 30 Doradus Nebula, Tarantula Nebula
Type: Local Universe : Nebula : Type : Star Formation
Category: Nebulae
Constellation: Dorado
Distance: 170000 light years
Release date: 29 September 1999, 07:00
Credit: NASA/ESA/Nolan Walborn ( Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.) and Rodolfo Barba (La Plata Observatory, La Plata, Argentina)

A Grand View of the Birth of 'Hefty Stars' - 30 Doradus Nebula Details (Hubble NICMOS View): The bottom panel is a composite of pictures taken through three infrared filters with Hubble's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS). In both cases the colours of the displays were chosen to correlate with the nebula's and stars' true colors.

Name: 30 Doradus Nebula, Tarantula Nebula
Type: Milky Way : Nebula : Type : Star Formation
Category: Nebulae
Constellation: Dorado
Distance: 170000 light years
Release date: 29 September 1999, 07:00
Credit: NASA/ESA/Nolan Walborn ( Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.) and Rodolfo Barba (La Plata Observatory, La Plata, Argentina)

Hubble Heritage Project's First Anniversary. A View of HH 32: HH 32 is an excellent example of a 'Herbig-Haro object', which is formed when young stars eject jets of material back into interstellar space. This object, about 1,000 light-years from Earth, is somewhat older than Hubble's variable nebula, and the wind from the bright central star has already cleared much of the dust out of the central region, thus exposing the star to direct view. Many young stars, like the central object in HH 32, are surrounded by disks of gas and dust that form as additional material is attracted gravitationally from the surrounding nebula.

Name: HH 32
Type: Milky Way : Star : Evolutionary Stage : Young Stellar ObjectMilky Way : Nebula : Type : Jet
Category: AnniversaryStars
Constellation: Aquila
Distance: 950 light years
Release date: 7 October 1999, 18:00
Credit: NASA/ESA/The Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI)

Hubble's variable nebula (NGC 2261): Hubble's variable nebula is named (like the Hubble telescope itself) after the American astronomer Edwin P. Hubble, who carried out some ofthe early studies of this object. It is a fan-shaped cloud of gas and dust which is illuminated by R Monocerotis (R Mon), the bright star at the bottom end of the nebula. Dense condensations of dust near the star cast shadows out into the nebula, and as they move the illumination changes, giving rise to the variations first noted by Hubble. The star itself, lying about 2,500 light-years from Earth, cannot be seen directly, but only through light scattered off of dust particles in the surrounding nebula. R Mon is believed to have a mass of about 10 times that of the Sun, and to have an age of only 300,000 years. There is probably a symmetrical counterpart of the fan-shaped nebula on the southern side of the star, but it is heavily obscured from view by dust lying between this lobe and our line of sight. The Hubble Heritage team made this image from observations of R Mon acquired by William Sparks (STScI), Sylvia Baggett (STScI) and collaborators.

Name: NGC 2261, R Mon
Type: Milky Way : Star : Type : VariableMilky Way : Nebula : Appearance : Reflection
Category: Nebulae
Constellation: Monoceros
Distance: 2500 light years
Release date: 7 October 1999, 18:00
Credit: NASA/ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI).

NGC 2346: NGC 2346 is a so-called "planetary nebula," which is ejected from Sun-like stars which are near the ends of their lives. NGC 2346 is remarkable because its central star is known to be actually a very close pair of stars, orbiting each other every 16 days. It is believed that the binary star was originally more widely separated. However, when one component of the binary evolved, expanded in size, and became a red-giant star, it literally swallowed its companion star. The companion star then spiralled downwards inside the red giant, and in the process spewed out gas into aring around the binary system. Later on, when the hot core of the red giant was exposed, it developed a faster stellar wind, which emerged perpendicularly to the ring and inflated two huge "bubbles". This two-stage process is believed to have resulted in the butterfly-like shape of the nebula. NGC 2346 lies about 2,000 light-years away from us, and is about one-third of a light-year in size.

Name: NGC 2346, V651 Mon
Type: Milky Way : Nebula : Type : Planetary
Category: Nebulae
Constellation: Monoceros
Distance: 2300 light years
Release date: 7 October 1999, 18:00
Credit: NASA/ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI).