A Distant backwater of the Milky Way: This bright spray of stars in the small but evocative constellation of Delphinus (the Dolphin) is the globular cluster NGC 6934. Globular clusters are large balls of (typically) a few hundred thousand ancient stars that exist on the edges of galaxies. Lying 50 000 light-years from Earth, in the outer reaches of our Milky Way galaxy, NGC 6934 is home to some of the most distant stars still to be part of our galactic system — in a sense, it is a far-flung suburb to the Milky Way’s city centre. NGC 6934 was first seen by William Herschel in the late eighteenth century. He classified it as a “bright nebula” and was not able to resolve it into stars. The cluster is not bright enough to see with the naked eye, and even in ideal conditions it is very difficult to view with binoculars. However, it is a popular target for amateur astronomers as it can easily be observed using relatively inexpensive telescopes. Broadcaster Patrick Moore, presenter of BBC TV’s The Sky at Night for more than 50 years, included this cluster in his “Caldwell catalogue” of celestial objects that amateur astronomers should look out for.NGC 6934’s faintness is down to its distance — not how bright it really is. With its many thousands of stars, the cluster is no minnow. The fact that the huge core of our galaxy dwarfs it, along with the other 150 or so globular clusters that orbit the Milky Way’s galactic centre, is a reminder of the breathtaking scale of the cosmos.This picture was taken with the Wide Field Channel of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. It was created from images taken through filters F814W (near infrared) and F606W (orange), coloured red and blue respectively. The exposure times were 29 minutes per filter, and the field of view is 3.3 arcminutes across.

Name: NGC 6934
Type: Milky Way : Star : Grouping : Cluster : Globular
Category: Star Clusters
Constellation: Delphinus
Distance: 50000 light years
Release date: 27 September 2010, 10:00
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

Star formation fireworks in Orion: The keen eye of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has often peered deeply into the Orion Nebula to see the processes occurring there and revealed many dramatic tableaux of young stars hurling material into space and entire solar systems forming. This image shows the spectacular region around an object known as Herbig-Haro 502, a very small part of the vast stellar nursery. The entire picture is filled with the rich colourful glow of the nebula and, just left of the centre, a star embedded in a pinkish glow can be also seen. This fascinating object is an example of a very young star surrounded by the cloud of gas from which it formed. This leftover material may accrete to form planets and eventually solar systems as intricate as our own. It is highly likely that the material that now forms our own planet Earth was part of a similar gaseous cocoon about five billion years ago. Such is the importance of these objects that much Hubble observing time has been dedicated to studying them. In this image Herbig-Haro 502 shows up as a narrow pink jet extending away from the young star as well as curved bow shock features to the upper-right and lower-left. Herbig-Haro objects are striking areas of nebulosity near to recently formed stars. They are created when the very young stars eject gas at breakneck speeds of hundreds of kilometres per second, which impacts the surrounding gas and dust. These ephemeral shockwaves are thought to dissipate after a few thousand years; the blink of an eye in astronomical terms. They vary in size but are often much larger than our own Solar System. At only around 1500 light-years distant, the Orion Nebula it is one of the closest areas of star formation to us. Understanding how stars form and evolve is an important area of astronomy, and one to which Hubble has greatly contributed. Images such as this are not only beautiful from an artistic perspective, but also help us understand more about how the Universe developed, and is continuing to change. This image was taken with the Wide Field Channel of the Advanced Camera for Surveys on Hubble. This picture was created from images taken through filters that isolate the light from glowing hydrogen (F658N, coloured red), ionised oxygen (F502N, coloured green) and yellow light (F550W, coloured blue). The exposures times were 1000 s, 2000 s and 1000 s respectively. The field of view is about 3.3 arcminutes across.

Name: Herbig-Haro 502, Orion Nebula
Type: Milky Way : Star : Evolutionary Stage : Young Stellar ObjectMilky Way : Nebula : Type : Star Formation
Category: NebulaeStars
Constellation: Orion
Distance: 1500 light years
Release date: 4 October 2010, 10:00
Credit: Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

A cosmic whirlpool in Tucana: The beautiful spiral galaxy NGC 406 was discovered in 1834 by John Herschel and is here imaged in great detail by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Located some 65 million light-years away, in the southern constellation of Tucana (the Toucan), NGC 406 is about 60 000 light-years across, roughly half the diameter of our galaxy, the Milky Way. It is a spiral galaxy quite similar to the well known Whirlpool galaxy (Messier 51, see http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/opo0110a/). In a moderate-sized amateur telescope NGC 406 would appear as a faint hazy blob, like thousands of others across the sky, and none of the spectacular fine detail in the Hubble picture could be made out. In this image the galaxy exhibits spiral arms that are mainly populated by young, massive, bluish stars and crossed by dark dust lanes. As is typically observed in this kind of spiral galaxy, the yellowish central bulge, dominated by an older stellar population, is less prominent and almost totally embedded in the disk structure. The deep image also shows a significant number of more distant galaxies in the background. Some of them are visible as reddish fuzzy spots through the bluish spiral arms of the foreground galaxy. This picture was created from images taken through near-infrared (F814W) and blue (F435W) filters, shown in red and blue respectively, using the Wide Field Channel of Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. The exposure times were twenty minutes per filter and the field of view is 2.7 by 1.6 arcminutes.

Name: NGC 406
Type: Local Universe : Galaxy : Type : Spiral
Category: Galaxies
Constellation: Tucana
Distance: 65 million light years
Release date: 11 October 2010, 10:00
Credit: ESA/Hubble and NASA