Eye candy from space: The most beautiful panoramas and photos of the universe around us

Spacewalkin’ in a winter wonderland

Credit: NASA.

Located within the Milky Way, about 5,500 light years from Earth, frosty-looking NGC 6357 is actually a “cluster of clusters” containing at least three clusters of young stars as well as the rest of the older, dimmer population of local stars. X-ray exposures from Chandra and ROSAT reveal hundreds of point sources, which are the young stars in NGC 6357, as well as diffuse X-ray emission from hot gas, supernovae, and even cavities like bubbles that have been blown by the radiation and material blowing away from the surfaces of massive stars. This composite image contains X-ray data from Chandra and ROSAT in purple, infrared data from Spitzer in orange, and visible-spectrum data from the UKIT’s SuperCosmos Sky Survey in blue.

Pismis 24-1

Credit: NASA, ESA and Jesús Maíz Apellániz (Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, Spain). Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin (ESA/Hubble).

This genuinely stunning and somehow very 80s tableau from the emission nebula NGC 6357, in Scorpius, depicts two different big names from the interstellar who’s who list. Pismis-1, the bright star in the cluster above, was once believed to be 200-300 solar masses, which would have been crazy huge. It’s been since revised down to “just” a hundred solar masses, which still means we can expect its life cycle to include a supernova — possibly a hypernova — and then a black hole. Below, there’s a bright young star blowing a stellar bubble inside the nebula. Its ultraviolet glow is part of what made it so hard for us to measure the mass of Pismis-1 and its fellows. Is it just me, or does it really look like this is painted on black velvet?


The spice must flow

Credit: Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2016), processed by ESA

It was not immediately clear to me that this was not from another planet. I thought it was from somewhere on the slopes of Mars, where the CO2 ice sublimates and makes water-like traces in the sand as it scoots down the dunes — but it is in fact from the Anti-Atlas mountain range bordering the Sahara in western Algeria. While it wasn’t an image of an exoplanet per se, we’re an exoplanet according to everywhere else in the Universe and this was taken from space by the Copernicus satellite, so here are some geological fractals for your viewing pleasure. The neat circular crater in the center is from an asteroid impact some 70 million years ago, which took place before the K-T boundary and while the dinosaurs were still quite alive

Mystic Mountain

Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Livio and the Hubble 20th Anniversary Team (STScI).

Splashy and sexy, the Mystic Mountain is actually one region of intense turbulence and high-energy stellar activity within the larger Carina Nebula. Pairs of opposing jets at the ends of these collapsing columns of gas are flung from accretion jets: hallmarks of stars being born. All that activity is eating the columns away from within, while it’s being burned away by other stars in its neighborhood. The denser, more opaque regions here have been resistant to the erosion. In this composite image, different colors correspond to the glow of different elements: oxygen in blue, hydrogen and nitrogen in green, and sulfur in red.
The Pinwheel Galaxy

Credit: European Space Agency & NASA

Messier 101 is found within Ursa Major, and it’s riddled with fun stuff. Supergiant star-forming regions litter the arms of this face-on spiral galaxy, of roughly equivalent size to the Milky Way but 23 million light years away. This composite image integrates data from the visible and infrared, and also used photographs from the ground-based Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT).
Orion, the Hunter

The Horsehead Nebula, imaged in the visible spectrum, with an opaque cloud of dust silhouetted against a luminous cloud of gas. The bright but unrelated star in the lower left foreground is Zeta Orionis, the easternmost star in Orion's belt. Credit: T.A.Rector (NOAO/AURA/NSF) and Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA/NASA)

Orion, the Hunter with his belt and sword, is a familiar presence in the night sky almost everywhere on the planet. It’s composed of very bright, faraway stars and nebulae, which means that long after apparent motion has distorted most of our other constellations beyond recognition, Orion will still shine as a beacon to people around the world. But not everywhere gets to see views like these. Observatories around the world worked together to make these composite images of the violently beautiful star nurseries in and near Orion, with data from many different parts of the EM spectrum. Looking at the sky in different spectra reveals very different portraits of the visible universe, including the deepest view of the Orion Nebula ever taken.

Hubble's sharpest-ever view of the Orion Nebula, composited from hundreds of images taken throughout the visible and infrared. This nebula covers the apparent angular size of the full moon. Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Robberto (Space Telescope Science Institute/ESA) and the Hubble Space Telescope Orion Treasury Project Team

The reflection nebula Messier 78, in Orion. This nebula is illuminated by reflected light from two nearby stars, about 1400 light years from Earth.. Credit: ESO/Igor Chekalin

The Orion Nebula, imaged with multiple infrared exposures using the VLT in Chile. The full size image is >16000x12000px, more than 1GB, and tends to saturate your RAM, although it is glorious to behold (and pan and zoom through!). Credit: ESO/H. Drass et al.

The Horsehead Nebula, imaged in the visible spectrum, with an opaque cloud of dust silhouetted against a luminous cloud of gas. The bright but unrelated star in the lower left foreground is Zeta Orionis, the easternmost star in Orion's belt. Credit: T.A.Rector (NOAO/AURA/NSF) and Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA/NASA)

The Orion Nebula (Messier 42), captured and composited in ten-minute near-infrared exposures.
 The image covers a region of sky about one degree by 1.5 degrees. Credit: ESO

Stellar nursery in Centaurus

Credit: ESO

“Nursery” might be in the name, but these places are anything but peaceful or serene. Nebulae shine so brightly because their component matter has been so thoroughly irradiated that it’s excited to a higher energy level and gives off photons as it calms back down. Bombarded by radiation in the UV, X-ray and gamma bands, star nurseries are even hostile to themselves. This star nursery lies at the center of a nebula in Centaurus that’s wracked with explosions and radiation so intense that they’re actually eroding away the dark, backlit clouds of dust you can see here silhouetted against the glow. In the ESO’s own words, the clouds — called Thackeray globules — are sizzling away in the onslaught like “lumps of butter dropped onto a hot frying pan.” They’ll probably be destroyed by their environment long before they can collapse to form new stars.


The Eagle Nebula

Credit: ESO

The Eagle Nebula spreads its wings here in the visible spectrum. Also visible near the heart of the nebula are the Pillars of Creation, themselves an iconic and much-photographed place in space.

The Medusa Nebula

Credit: ESO

The Medusa Cascade might be a figment of the Doctor Who universe, but we’ve a gorgeous Medusa of our own in the real world — the Medusa Nebula. As the Sun-like star at the core of this nebula died, it exploded and left behind these wisps and filaments of gas and dust. Stars like this one end their lives as white dwarf stars. At the end of its life span, our sun will become an object like this.

Bonus: Paranal is charging their laser

Credit: ESO/Y. Beletsky

Full disclosure: this one is more like eye candy of the tech that makes the other eye candy. This laser on the Very Large Telescope excites atmospheric sodium, thought to be left over from ancient meteorites. (You might recognize in the laser beam the flat yellow color of a sodium street light.) It’s creating an “artificial star” at an altitude of 90 km, whose interference characteristics help cancel out interference from water vapor and atmospheric detritus. The whole process actually reduces optical noise and gives the telescope a view almost as clear as if there were no atmosphere at all. 15,000 feet up in the Atacama Desert, where there’s barely a visible atmosphere to begin with, the ESO radio telescopes can take advantage of some of the clearest skies on Earth.