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Rho Ophiuchi is a star in the constellation Ophiuchus (the Serpent Bearer) over 400 light years away. Although the human eye would see the colorful nebula of Rho Ophiuchi as grey, the right equipment can show up the colors. The colors tell us what's going on in the clouds.

Blue regions are mostly reflected light from Rho Ophiuchi and its neighboring stars. As in the Earth's daytime sky, the blue is more efficiently scattered than the redder light. Red and yellow are where the hydrogen gas in the nebula are energized by high energy radiation from nearby bright stars. Dust grains block the light behind them, so those regions show up as brown.

Image Credit & Copyright: Tom Masterson, ESO's DSS

Wow !

This mysterious giant bubble in space is located in the constellation Hydra. And it isn't really mysterious, it's a common astronomical object: a planetary nebula. Planetary nebulae are formed when dying sunlike stars slough off their outer layers. They can come in all sorts of different and fascinating shapes. William Herschel called them planetary nebula, because seen through an 18th century telescope, ones like this seemed to have a disk like a planet.

The image was taken by ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile.

Amazing!

Here is a selection of 9 images from ESO's new panorama of the Small Magellanic Cloud, one of our neighboring dwarf galaxies. Interstellar dust obscures some of the features of the little galaxy, but VISTA is able to image in the infrared which can see through the dust. Pretty cool, huh?

Credit: ESO/VISTA VMC

Here's the whole image of the SMC.

Pretty cool indeed!

The central parts of our Galaxy, the Milky Way,

Credit: ESO/S. Gillessen et al.

Here is the barred spiral galaxy Messier 77 captured face-on by ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT). It's 47 million light years away in the constellation Cetus (the sea monster). M77 is a massive galaxy and around 100,000 light years across. It's also what's known as an active galaxy. That's a type of galaxy which is extremely luminous because it's powered by a central supermassive black hole.

The star that seems to be beside the galaxy center is actually a foreground star in our own Milky Way. You can tell this because its brightness creates diffraction spikes. There is not only a foreground, but also a background to M77 – there are many even more distant galaxies, tiny things seen just outside the spiral arms.

very beautiful.

Here's the Orion Nebula and its associated cluster of young stars in beautiful detail. The nebula is one of the closest stellar nurseries to us, about 1350 light years away.

Credit: ESO/G. Beccari

The image is from ESO's VLT Sky Survey Telescope.