Since it's Christmas Day, I want to share a Hubble image of a star-forming region that looks like a snow angel. It doesn't have a nickname, but it's cataloged as Sharpless 2-106.

The outstretched “wings” are lobes of super-hot gas, glowing blue, stretching outward from the central star into the colder surroundings. A ring of dust & gas orbiting the star acts like a belt, pulling the expanding nebula into an hourglass shape.

(Credit: NASA, ESA, & Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA))

The sky is beautiful. Awesome.

NGC 6818 is also known as the Little Gem Nebula. It's a planetary nebula located in the constellation of Sagittarius, roughly 6000 light-years away from us. The rich glow of the cloud is just over half a light-year across. When stars like the Sun use up their hydrogen fuel, they shed their outer layers into space to create glowing clouds of gas called planetary nebulae. This ejection of mass is uneven, and planetary nebulae can have very complex shapes. (Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA)

Oh, wow! Look at this!

The Hubble view of the "Pillars of Creation", a stellar nursery in the Eagle Nebula, is one of its most famous images. But here is a view of the pillars taken in infrared, which is able to penetrate the dust and gas to give a different view. It lets us see the baby stars and hot young stars being formed within the pillars. The pillars are silhouetted against a blue haze.

Photo credit: NASA, ESA/Hubble and the Hubble Heritage Team

IC 4592: A Blue Horsehead in the constellation Scorpius. (Credit & Copyright: Rogelio Bernal Andreo) A complex of reflection nebulae whose overall outline suggests the profile of a horse. The characteristic blue hue of reflection nebulae is caused by the tendency of interstellar dust to more strongly scatter blue starlight than red.

The interstellar medium fills the space between the stars. It's a mix of molecular clouds, cold and warm gases, regions of electrically charged hydrogen, and more.

This Herschel image shows the Serpens Core, the heart of a giant molecular cloud. The Core is the bright clump towards the upper right.

Molecular clouds are the densest part of the interstellar medium. ESA’s Herschel space observatory has revealed that many are built around filaments, with dense threads snaking throughout each cloud. These filaments potentially transport material, and, when massive enough, are known to form new stars. Giant molecular clouds can stretch for hundreds of light-years. Compared to the rest of space they are dense, but this is relative because even at their densest, they're much emptier than the best laboratory vacuums we can produce on Earth.

Credit: ESA/Herschel/PACS/SPIRE/V. Roccatagliata (U. München, Germany)

Isn't space photogenic - just awesome.

The Red Rectangle is some 2300 light-years away in the constellation Monoceros. One of the stars in HD 44179 is in the last stages of its life and has been shedding its outer layers into space. Such a cloud of gas is called a planetary nebula, even though it's nothing to do with planets. They just looked somewhat like planets in 18th century telescopes.

This X-shaped nebula is an unusual one. It may occur because a thick disc of dust surrounds the star and funnels the dying star's outflow into two wide cones. The edges of these show up as the diagonal lines
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(Copyright: ESA/Hubble and NASA)

It looks like a butterfly.

You're right, Angie, it does look like a stylized butterfly. But how about this one? This is NGC 6302 and its nickname is the Butterfly Nebula. It's in the constellation Scorpius. What a beauty.

(Image Credit: NASA/ESA/Hubble)

That one too. It is amazing.

Here is an image of a great cold cloud of gas and dust where stars are forming. It was taken the Herschel Space Observatory that observed in the infrared. We can't see in infrared, so the image is color-coded, with blue showing the coldest part and red slightly warmer. The blue filament is catalogued as G82.65-2.00 and contains 800 times as much mass as the Sun. The dust in the filament has a temperature of –259ºC. At this low temperature, if the filament contains enough mass it is likely that this section will collapse into stars.

Credit & copyright: ESA/Herschel/SPIRE/M. Juvela (U. Helsinki, Finland)

A planetary nebula is created by a dying sunlike star sloughing off its outer layers. They tend to be rounded. But not the Ant Nebula! This is Mz3 and astronomers don't know why it's doubled.

Image Credit: R. Sahai (JPL) et al., Hubble Heritage Team, ESA, NASA

May 15th was the birth anniversary of astronomer Williamina Fleming (1857-1911). She discovered the Horsehead Nebula. But she didn't see it in the infrared light of the Hubble photo. Infrared can penetrate the obscuring dust to give a quite ethereal structure with delicate folds of gas.

Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI)

This is the Jellyfish Nebula (IC443).

Eta Geminorum is the bright star at the bottom. The jellyfish tentacles dangle below and left of center. The nebula is a supernova remnant, the debris from the explosion that signaled the death of a massive star tens of thousands of years ago. Within the nebula is a neutron star which is the collapsed core of the dead star.

Image credit: Eric Coles

Amazing!

Nancy, you took the words right out of my mouth. Space photos are all amazing and awesome.

Fabulous image of the R136 star cluster which is at the heart of the Tarantula Nebula.

Credit: NASA, ESA, and F. Paresce (INAF-IASF, Bologna, Italy), R. O’Connell (University of Virginia, Charlottesville), and the Wide Field Camera 3 Science Oversight Committee

Fabulous indeed!

I agree -