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Valentine's Day doesn't have an astronomical origin, but heart shapes abound.

Valentine's Day. Is it a romantic day or one invented by greeting card companies and sellers of luxury goods? It certainly isn't an astronomical holiday, but whatever your view of the day, you can enjoy this selection of cosmic valentines.

Astronomical Valentines

Valentine's Day is no assurance that love is in the air. Hearts and flowers aren't guaranteed to come your way. You may or may not get one of the billion valentine cards that are sent each year. But heart shapes are everywhere and anyone can admire them. Here is a cosmic selection for everyone.

Cosmic Valentines

From ESA with love is a small selection of images with heart-shapes. My favorite from the European Space Agency's selection is one created from three images acquired by their Earth observation satellite Envisat. It's of the Sebkha Te-n-Dghamcha depression in Mauritania, north of the capital city Nouakchott. It looks to me like an abstract painting.

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A heart on Mars that looks like a heart-shaped hill. But it's actually a heart-shaped pit of a kind geologists call a graben. NASA's Mars Global Surveyor took the picture.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS.

Nebulae (giant gas clouds) are known by their catalog numbers, such as IC 1805. That shows its entry in the Index Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars, but it has a nickname too. Here is IC 1805, also known as the Heart Nebula. And when I say "giant" gas clouds, it's no exaggeration. The Heart Nebula is some 200 light-years across. Its apparent shape is created through a combination of glowing gas and dark clouds of dust. A stellar nursery within it contains a cluster of hot young stars that energize the hydrogen gas in the nebula and make it glow red.

Credit & Copyright: Daniel Marquardt

W5, a stellar nursery in the constellation Cassiopeia. Hot bright young stars deep inside this nebula are releasing ultraviolet radiation and winds of charged particles. These carve out a cavity in the nebula - and in this case the cavity looks like a heart.

Probably the most popular image from the New Horizon's fly-by of Pluto in 2015 was the heart shape on Pluto, a landform unofficially named Sputnik Planum.