The Eagle Nebula M16

The beauty of the Eagle Nebula glows bright!

Pillars of dark dust nicely outline some of the denser towers of star formation. 
Energetic light from young massive stars causes the gas to glow and effectively boils away part of the dust and gas from its birth pillar. 

Many of these stars will explode after several million years, returning most of their elements back to the nebula which formed them. This process is forming an open cluster of stars known as M16. Wow!

The Great Nebula In Orion

One of those pictures that make you GASP.
The Great Nebula in Orion is an intriguing place. Visible to the unaided eye, it appears as a small fuzzy patch in the constellation of Orion. 
But this image, shows the Orion Nebula to be a bustling neighborhood or recently formed stars, hot gas, and dark dust. The power behind much of the Orion Nebula (M42) is the stars of the Trapezium star cluster, seen near the center of the above wide field image.
The orange glow surrounding the bright stars pictured here is their own starlight reflected by intricate dust filaments that cover much of the region. The current Orion Nebula cloud complex, which includes the Horsehead Nebula, will slowly disperse over the next 100,000 years.

Butterfly Nebula M2-9

::::Will never tire of seeing this::::
In the case of low-mass stars like our Sun and Butterfly nebula (M2-9) pictured above, the stars transform themselves from normal stars to white dwarfs by casting off their outer gaseous envelopes. 

The expended gas frequently forms an impressive display called a planetary nebula that fades gradually over thousand of years. M2-9, a butterfly planetary nebula 2100 light-years away shown in representative colors, has wings that tell a strange but incomplete tale. In the center, two stars orbit inside a gaseous disk 10 times the orbit of Pluto.

The expelled envelope of the dying star breaks out from the disk creating the bipolar appearance. Much remains unknown about the physical processes that cause planetary nebulae.

NGC 1999 :: Orion Nebula

Highly Enigmatic......South of the large star-forming region known as the Orion Nebula, lies bright blue reflection nebula NGC 1999. 

At the edge of the Orion molecular cloud complex some 1,500 light-years distant, NGC 1999's illumination is provided by the embedded variable star V380 Orionis. 

That nebula is marked with a dark sideways T-shape near center in this cosmic vista that spans about 10 light-years.

The dark shape was once assumed to be an obscuring dust cloud seen in silhouette against the bright reflection nebula. But recent infrared images indicate the shape is likely a hole blown through the nebula itself by energetic young stars. In fact, this region abounds with energetic young stars producing jets and outflows with luminous shock waves.

Seven Strong Men Of Russia!

You may have heard of the Seven Sisters in the sky, but have you heard about the Seven Strong Men on the ground?!! (note the small guy next to one of them)

Located just west of the Ural Mountains, the unusual Manpupuner rock formations are one of the Seven Wonders of Russia. 

How these ancient 40-meter high pillars formed is yet unknown. The persistent photographer of this featured image battled rough terrain and uncooperative weather to capture these rugged stone towers in winter at night, being finally successful in February of last year.

High above, millions of stars shine down, while the band of our Milky Way Galaxy crosses diagonally down from the upper left.

Star Forming Complex W33

The cosmic cloud of gas and dust is W33, a massive starforming complex some 13,000 light-years distant, near the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy. So what are all those yellow balls? Citizen scientists of the web-based Milky Way Project found the features they called yellow balls as they scanned many Spitzer images and persistently asked that question of researchers. 

Now there is an answer. The yellow balls in Spitzer images are identified as an early stage of massive star formation.

They appear yellow because they are overlapping regions of red and green, the assigned colors that correspond to dust and organic molecules known as PAHs at Spitzer wavelengths.

Yellow balls represent the stage before newborn massive stars clear out cavities in their surrounding gas and dust and appear as green-rimmed bubbles with red centers in the Spitzer image. Of course, the astronomical crowdsourcing success story is only part of the Zooniverse. The Spitzer image spans 0.5 degrees or about 100 light-years at the estimated distance of W33

The 'Mice' Galaxies

These two mighty galaxies are pulling each other apart!!

Known as the "Mice" because they have such long tails, each spiral galaxy has likely already passed through the other.

The long tails are created by the relative difference between gravitational pulls on the near and far parts of each galaxy.

Because the distances are so large, the cosmic interaction takes place in slow motion -- over hundreds of millions of years.

NGC 4676 lies about 300 million light-years away toward the constellation of Bernice's Hair (Coma Berenices) and are likely members of the Coma Cluster of Galaxies.

The above picture was taken with the Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys in 2002. These galactic mice will probably collide again and again over the next billion years until they coalesce to form a single galaxy.