Hubble’s Nebulae

A Collection of Hubble Nebula Images

This Hubble Space Telescope image shows how young, energetic, massive stars illuminate and sculpt their birthplace with powerful winds and...

A large, red, nebula of dust and gas at the top right portion of the image with a small blue bubble at the bottom left.

Huge waves are sculpted in this two-lobed nebula called the Red Spider Nebula (or NGC 6537), located some 3,000 light-years...

Two-lobed orange nebula with red-and-center and a black background scattered with stars.

A nebula in the constellation of Cassiopeia has flowing veils of gas and dust that have earned it the nickname...

This nebula, officially known as Hen 2-104, is located several thousand light-years from Earth in the southern hemisphere constellation of...

X-shaped nebula in colors of green, yellow, and rusty brown. Bright glowing orange center with two lobes.

This colorful Hubble image gives us a window seat to the universe’s extraordinary tapestry of stellar birth and destruction. At...

Bright rainbow-colored nebula that looks like colorful waves breaking, with dark clouds of gas extending from the center.

These delicate wisps of gas make up an object known as SNR B0519-69.0, or SNR 0519 for short. The thin,...

Red lines form a rose-esque sphere against a field thick with stars.

This Hubble Space Telescope image shows a very thin section of a supernova remnant caused by a stellar explosion that...

A black background dotted with stars is bisected from the lower-left corner to the upper-right corner by a slightly twisted strand of red gas and dust.

This close-up shot of the center of the Lagoon Nebula (Messier 8) clearly shows the delicate structures formed when the...

Clouds of gas cover the entire view, in a variety of bold colors. in the center the gas is brighter and very textured, resembling dense smoke. around the edges it is sparser and fainter. several small, bright blue stars are scattered over the nebula.

This image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope reveals a vibrant nebula far from Earth. Its colors, produced by the light...

Glowing whitish center with two bright white stars glowing like eyes. Surrounded by brown, black, and red gas and dust, with a tendril of green gas on the left.

This eerie Hubble image features the center of the Trifid Nebula and the three wing-like bands of thick dust for...

Red and brown gas and dust with several bright stars at the center. The image is a set of rectangles mosaiced together.

NGC 2440 is a planetary nebula, made up of gas and dust ejected by a dying star. The central star...

A red center surrounded by lobes of red, pink, gray, and white.

A giant cosmic necklace glows brightly in this Hubble Space Telescope image. The object, aptly named the Necklace Nebula, is...

A hazy greenish oval near the center with a glowing white star at the center and outlined with glowing white "beads", giving off a teal haze. A black background dotted with stars and a couple of spots of faint, dark red haze.

This planetary nebula is known as Kohoutek 4-55 (or K 4-55) and is one of a series of planetary nebulae...

A glowing, jagged ring encircles a small central region of greenish clouds, making it appear like a hole torn in fabric. This “hole” is itself encircled by a band of silvery-blue clouds and a larger, fainter, yellow ring of gas. Puffy, smoky clouds of orange and red gas billow out from there into a large oval nebula, fading into the dark background of space dotted by stars.

A delicate sphere of gas, photographed by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, floats serenely in the depths of space. The pristine...

Black background dotted with stars. A dark-red transparent bubble of gas looking like a ring. Stars are visible through the center of the ring.

This is one of the largest panoramic images ever taken with Hubble's cameras. It is a 50-light-year-wide view of the...

Entire image is filled with green, brown, rusty colors of the Carina Nebula. Chaotic groupings of this dust and gas with stars dispersed randomly throughout the image.

This celestial object looks like a delicate butterfly. But it is far from serene. What resemble dainty butterfly wings are...

Two lobes of gas fan outward from a center point. One to the upper-right corner, the other to the lower-left corner. The cloud is bright, pinkish-white at the center getting darker toward the edges where it is a dark, pinkish-orange.

Resembling a nightmarish beast rearing its head from a crimson sea, this monstrous object is actually an innocuous pillar of...

A wide, dark pillar surrounded by wispy red tendrils extends from lower left to upper right across most of the frame. The cone-shaped pillar narrows gradually to a smooth, rounded top.

Because the nebula is nearby, it appears as nearly one-half the diameter of the full Moon. This required Hubble astronomers...

Black background. At image center is a colorful ring of gas and dust. The ring is a deep red along the outside. Moving inward toward the center of the ring, the colors change from red, to orange, to yellow, to pinkish-white, to a light blue sphere in the center.

This haunting spire, captured by Hubble in visible and infrared light, is composed of cold gas and dust within M16....

Hubble view of a brownish spire of gas and dust within M16, against a background of mostly red and some blue gas.

This stellar relic was first spied by William Herschel in 1787. The fuzzy outer region is a disk of material...

At the center of the image is the dying star. It's surrounded by a white-and-orange wispy "cloud" of gas. Farther away, more gas and dust creates an orange-and-yellow circular "ring" around the center.

Astronomers used the Hubble Space telescope to revisit one of its most iconic subjects, the so-called "Pillars of Creation" in...

Three giant pillars of rusty colored dust and gas with a blueish green background.

Peering deep into M1, this spectacular Hubble image captures the nebula’s beating heart: the rapidly spinning pulsar at its core....

The central neutron star is the rightmost of the two bright stars near the center of this image. The rapid motion of the material nearest to the central star is revealed by the subtle rainbow of colors in this time-lapse image, the rainbow effect being due to the movement of material over the time between one image and another.

Images made with the Wide Field/Planetary Camera on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have revealed the structure of a thin sheet...

A nebula that strongly resembles flames in terms of shape. On the left side of the image, they're colored more red and pink, then blend into purple near the center, and then to light blue and dark green on the right.

This Hubble Space Telescope image shows a small region of the Great Nebula in Orion. The Orion Nebula is one...

The image is "stairstepped" in the upper right (meaning that there's no image there. On the left, a bright orange streak of gas extends top to bottom, with a bright pink-red star in the upper-left. In the lower right is a bright white, orange, and yellow blob of gas that looks like an explosion. The area between this "explosion" and the orange streak is swirls of light blue gas with streaks of black and orange.

This spectacular color panorama of the center of the Orion Nebula is one of the largest pictures ever assembled from...

This region of the Orion Nebula is seen as a colorful, bright region of gas and dust, mostly in shades of green, yellow, orange and brown. It's brightest toward the center and darkens at the image edges.

This is a Hubble Space Telescope image of the tattered debris of a star that exploded 3,000 years ago as...

Tendrils of gas are scattered across the image in no pattern, as if streaming from the upper-left portion. Some are purple-pink in color, others are blue-green.

This Hubble Space Telescope image of planetary nebula NGC 7027 shows remarkable details of the process by which a star...

Bright yellow-orange cloud of dust and gas forming a glob in the center with thin light-yellow gas surrounding it, while the outer edges are blue.

This is an image of MyCn18, a young planetary nebula located about 8,000 light-years away, taken with the Wide Field...

Two sets of rings in orange and gold stacked one above the other form the shape of a hourglass. At image center, where the two sets of rings overlap, is an area of white, green and black dust in a shape that is similar to the human eye.

This colorful image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows the collision of two gases near a dying star. Astronomers have...

The lower left corner of gas and dust is a bright orangish-yellow. Streams of gas resembling tadpoles flow up and to the right from this cloud, which fades into a pink-yellow, then to a green-blue, and then into blue.

M2-9 is a striking example of a "butterfly" or a bipolar planetary nebula. Another more revealing name might be the...

Bright white star in the center of the image, with two bright blueish green plumes of dust and gas on either side moving away from the center star.

This Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 image captures the infancy of the Stingray Nebula (Hen-1357), the youngest known planetary...

A stingray-shaped cloud of gas and dust. The star glowing at the center, and the very outer edges, are bright pink, while the gas in between is light green.

NGC 3132 is a striking example of a planetary nebula. This expanding cloud of gas, surrounding a dying star, is...

A bright star shines at the center of a rainbow-colored "bubble", spreading outward from it. The inner oval around the star is a turquoise color, which has a yellow ring around it, which then turns to orange, and has red wisps at the outer edges.

Resembling an aerial fireworks explosion, this dramatic NASA Hubble Space Telescope picture of the energetic star WR124 reveals it is...

A yellow-and-red nebula resembling a fiery explosion surrounding a bright star on a black background.

This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image of the Trifid Nebula reveals a stellar nursery being torn apart by radiation from...

$A tightly cropped Hubble view of a vast star-forming region known as the Trifid Nebula. The top left is bright blue. Brown and amber colors run from top right through the center in irregular, overlapping lines to the bottom-center. At bottom right, the view is almost black. Tiny, amber-colored stars appear throughout the scene. Toward the left there is a prominent brown shape that looks like a head with two horns. The left horn points left and is wavy. The right horn is triangular and points up. The brown dust continues, flowing down, as if along a back, and up toward the top right. A prominent line, about the same length as the left horn, appears below the middle of the body, and changes from orange to red. A small, separate semi-transparent pillar is left of the head. A few slightly larger, blue foreground stars with four diffraction spikes appear throughout.$