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Hubble’s Galaxies

A collection of galaxy images from the Hubble Space Telescope.

Though the universe is chock full of spiral-shaped galaxies, no two look exactly the same. This face-on spiral galaxy, called...
Face-on spiral galaxy. Bright-white core surrounded by spiral arms. Areas of reddish-pink star formation regions dot the spiral arms which appear like a light-bluish haze. Dark rusty-brown dust lanes follow the curves of the spiral arms.
The barred spiral galaxy NGC 6217 lies 60 million light-years away in the north circumpolar constellation Ursa Major. This galaxy,...
A barred spiral galaxy viewed face-on. The bar is nearly vertically oriented, at a bit of an angle. The center is a glowing orange pink, with pink globs of gas appearing as the arms coming off both bars, and in patches throughout the galaxy. Many swirls of brown dust are laced throughout. Between the gas and dust and blue-white swirls of stars.
Rings of brilliant blue stars encircle the bright, active core of this spiral galaxy named Markarian 817. Viewed nearly face-on,...
A pinkish spiral galaxy, with blue-white outer spirals, appears in the center of this image but appears rather small compared to the rest of it. It is set against a black background with dozens of other stars and galaxies of different shapes and colors.
The magnificent galaxy NGC 4710 is tilted nearly edge-on to our view from Earth. This perspective allows astronomers to easily...
The brown and black dust from this edge-on galaxy looks like a horizontal streak or line through the center of the image, emitting a bright white glow in all directions. It's set on a black background full of other galaxies and a few foreground stars.
Elliptical galaxy Messier 87 (M87) is the home of several trillion stars, a supermassive black hole, and a family of...
A bright, yellowish galaxy core shines near the center, with a faint jet of material ejecting toward the right.
This galaxy, called NGC 1569, sparkles with the light from millions of newly formed young stars. NGC 1569 is pumping...
A bright red galaxy shines near the top of the image in shades of pink and white.
Elliptical galaxy NGC 4660 is one of a hundred galaxies imaged by Hubble that are members of the nearest large...
A bright-white elliptical galaxy extends from the lower-left to the upper-right of the image. Its core is at image center and shines bright-white.
NGC 5679 is a galaxy trio found in the constellation Virgo. Yellowish older stars can be seen in the central...
Two spiral galaxies are shown right next to each other, with a smaller distorted galaxy on the far left. The galaxy in the center (the left spiral galaxy) has pink and blue-white areas of stars, with thick streaks of brown dust. The right spiral galaxy is a bar spiral, mostly blue-white with small pink patches. Two white stars glow brightly in the foreground just above this galaxy.
This image of galaxy NGC 1275 reveals fine, thread-like filamentary structures in the gas surrounding the galaxy. The red filaments...
A galaxy with red filaments of gas protruding from it in multiple directions.
This image captures the rare alignment of two spiral galaxies along the same line of sight. The outer rim of...
A bright, mostly-white spiral galaxy (with hints of yellow, blue, and pink) lies at the center of this image. Another, smaller galaxy (mostly white with dark red dust at its edges) lies on the larger spiral's right side, blocking a bit of it. The black background is thick with thousands of stars of different colors.
Messier 81 (M81) is the largest and brightest member of a group of 34 galaxies found in the constellation Ursa...
A bright spiral galaxy with a large, yellow core, with small spiral arms surrounding it.
The elliptical galaxy NGC 1132 reveals the final result of what may have been a group of galaxies that merged...
A bright halo around a glowing white sphere on a black background filled with hundreds of other galaxies of various shapes, sizes, and colors.
NGC 1672 is a barred spiral galaxy located in the constellation Dorodo. As seen in this image, dust lanes extend...
A spiral galaxy with an oval-shaped disk. Two large arms curve out away from the ends of the disk. Bright pink patches and dark reddish threads of dust fill the arms. The bright pink patches indicate where stars are forming. The core is very bright and filled with stars. Some large stars appear in front of the galaxy. Directly under the point where the right arm joins the disk, a fading supernova is visible as a green dot.
Messier 74 (M74), also called NGC 628, is a stunning example of a "grand-design" spiral galaxy that is viewed by...
A large spiral galaxy fills the image. Its bright, yellow core is near the upper left, surrounded by big spiral arms laced through with dark dust and purple and pink regions of star formation.
NGC 4449 is a relatively nearby galaxy located in the constellation Canes Venatici. It is classified as an irregular galaxy,...
A large smear of stars, almost shaped like a bow-tie, covers most of the image. The center of the "bow" is full of pink clumps of gas, while the outsides consist of blue-white stars, streaks of dark dust, and more pink globs of gas.
This giant spiral disk of stars, dust, and gas is 170,000 light-years across or nearly twice the diameter of our...
Looking like a pinwheel, this face-on spiral galaxy holds a bright-white core at image center. Arms curve outward from the core. They hold dark dust lanes and bright star-forming regions. All on a black background dotted with stars.
A spectacular dark band of light-absorbing dust in front of this galaxy's bright nucleus gives rise to its nicknames of...
A spiral galaxy fills the image. Dark spiral arms dotted with brown dust and pinkish bursts of stars surround a bright core.
Galaxy Messier 82 (M82), also known as the Cigar Galaxy, is remarkable for its bright blue disk, webs of shredded...
A white band of stars that cuts across a black background, from the lower left to the upper right, is the galaxy M82. Reddish brown gas and dust overlays the galaxy concentrated in the center of the image and fanning out above and below the white band of the galaxy. Black background is dotted with stars.
Stunning details of the face-on spiral galaxy NGC 1309 are captured in this image. Bright blue areas of star formation...
A top-down view of a spiral galaxy, showing its brightly-shining center, its broad spiral arms, and the faint halo around its disk, as well as distant galaxies and stars on a dark background. Large blue clouds of gas speckled with small stars and strands of dark dust swirl around the galaxy’s disk. A couple of the background galaxies are large enough that their own swirling spiral arms are visible.
NGC 1300 is considered by many as a prototypical barred spiral galaxy. Barred spirals differ from normal spiral galaxies in...
Image center holds the an oval of stars that mark the galaxy's center. Arms extend toward the upper-left and lower right of the central bulge of stars. Extending beyond the ends of each of these arms is are long curving tails that swirl above and below the galaxy.
Ring galaxies arise from a collision in which one galaxy plunges directly through the disk of another one. Seen here...
Two galaxies. The one on the upper-left is an orange-ish barred spiral with brown streaks. The one on the right near the center has a yellow core, and the blue-white ring of stars with streaks of red-brown gas is close to the core on the left in the direction of the other galaxy, but forms a wider tail-like ring on the right.
Spiral galaxy NGC 3949 lies about 50 million light-years from Earth. It is a member of a loose cluster of...
A spiral galaxy with a bright, glowing yellow-orange center surrounded by pink, blue, and white swirls of stars; pink globs of gas dotted throughout; and black swirls of dust. All set against the black background of space.
The hallmark of the Sombrero Galaxy, Messier 104 (M104), is a brilliant white, bulbous core encircled by thick dust lanes...
A bright hazy, oblate ball of stars fills the scene. Its core is bright white. Around the equator is a disk of bright stars and dark dust. The dust lane is prominent and bisects the sphere of stars.
Amid a backdrop of far-off galaxies, the majestic dusty spiral NGC 3370 looms in the foreground of this picture. The...
A spiral galaxy in the upper-left portion of the image, with blue-white arms and a hazy white glow. Distant orange galaxies can be seen in the background off to the right. The black background is dotted with hundreds more.
To the surprise of astronomers, galaxy NGC 4622 appears to be rotating in the opposite direction from what they expected....
A large, face-on galaxy. It has a bright-white center with yellowish spiral arms. The spiral arm form concentric circles near the galaxy's core and curve outward further away from the galaxy.
A nearly perfect ring of hot, blue stars pinwheels about the yellow nucleus of an unusual galaxy known as Hoag's...
A large ring of circular blue stars surrounds a bright, large yellow nucleus, with a large gap between the ring and the nucleus.
In this image, the spiral galaxy NGC 4319 (center) and a quasar called Markarian 205 (upper right), appear to be...
Just above center is a barred spiral galaxy with a white core and two spiral arms of white stars laced with red-brown dust. In the upper-right corner is what appears to be a bright white star, actually the quasar. Dozens more galaxies and stars of different colors and shapes dot the black background.
Tightly wound, almost concentric arms of dark dust encircle the bright nucleus of galaxy NGC 2787 in this Hubble image...
The center of the galaxy looks like a brightly glowing white sphere, surrounded by numerous concentric, circular arc (only visible above and to the right of the center) of reddish-brown dust. A dozen or so galaxies dot the black background as dots of different colors, mostly white.
NGC 4013 is a spiral galaxy, similar to our own Milky Way. Viewed pole-on, it would look like a nearly...
A galaxy viewed edge-on, looking like a thick line of gas and dust running from the top-left corner to the bottom-right corner. The center of the "line" (the thickest area of gas) is black, then surrounded above and blow with red-brown dust, and above and below that with a white halo. This halo is thicker in the top-left, and the center gleams as a four-pronged white dot. Dozens more stars and galaxies dot the black background in the distance.
The galaxy NGC 3310 is a member of a rare class known as "starburst" galaxies, which blaze with extremely active...
A hurricane-shaped galaxy, with a reddish core (the "eye" of the storm) and white spiral arms of stars (the hurricane's "clouds"). The galaxy has streaks of dark gas and dust, and a yellowish glow.
NGC 6782 is a spiral galaxy located in the southern constellation Pavo. When seen in visible light, it exhibits tightly...
An oval-shaped spiral galaxy. The center is a glowing white, closely surrounded by a blue-white ring of stars. Two orange-brown arms of dust stream out from this center on opposite sides to an outer ring of stars, also whitish but far fainter. The area between the two white rings is a glowing yellow, with more streaks of brownish dust. Dozens of stars dot the black background.
Taken in visible light, this image shows a magnified view of the magnificent spiral galaxy Messier 51 (M51), dubbed the...
A large, face-on spiral galaxy fills the image. Its bright core is surrounded by reddish-brown dusty spiral arms full of bright patches of reddish-pink gas..
In this view of the center of the magnificent barred spiral galaxy NGC 1512, Hubble's broad spectral vision reveals the...
A multicolored spiral galaxy. The whole area between the center and the thick outer ring glows yellow-orange with thin streaks of red-brown dust. The outer ring is a thick, dark (almost black) ring with patches of thick pinkish-purple gas.
Galaxies come in a range of shapes and sizes, and astronomers use this fact to classify them based on their...
A wide image with a large spiral galaxy on the far left and a much smaller galaxy, resembling a pinkish-blue sphere of stars, on the far right.
Even though it's only 13 million light-years distant and bright enough to be seen by amateur telescopes, the Circinus Galaxy...
A spiral galaxy that is white in its center, red at its edges, and blackish-brown in between. Purple gas rises up and out of the white center in the shape of a V.
The Hubble telescope captured an image of an unusual edge-on galaxy, revealing remarkable details of its warped dusty disk and...
A bright ball of stars at image center. Along the equator of the ball is a warped disk of dust that appears like a dark, gentle wave across the ball of stars. Black background with a smattering of stars.
A swarm of nearly 8,000 blue stars resembles a blizzard of snowflakes near the core (lower right) of galaxy Messier...
A bluish image of the core and surrounding of a companion galaxy to Andromeda. The thick, glowing light blue core is in the lower-right of the image, surrounded by blue stars that get less dense farther away from the core on the left side of the image.
Located about 130 million light-years away, NGC 4650A is one of only 100 known polar ring galaxies. Their unusual disk-ring...
A disk of red stars ringed by dust, gas, and more stars.
Surprisingly complex loops and blobs of cosmic dust lie across the face of the giant elliptical galaxy NGC 1316. These...
A glowing white core surrounded by a bowtie-shaped cloud of dark red dust, with thousands more stars and galaxies glowing more faintly in the background.
The barred spiral galaxy NGC 1365 in Fornax is feeding material into its central region, igniting massive star birth and...
A galaxy with a glowing orange core to the left of center. Two thick arms of black-brown dust swirl out of the core, one from the right side arcing above the core up to the upper-left of the image, the other from the left side, arcing below the core to the lower-right corner. Swirls of white stars are visible behind the dust, surrounding the core. The whole image has a brownish hue.