Category — Astronomy

In the Large Magellanic Cloud, stars form and evolve, blazing with high-energy radiation, lighting up glowing tapestries of dust and gas in the surrounding nebula (click on image to enlarge).

Hubble Image of NGC 2074

This image was taken in commemoration of the 100,000th orbit of the Hubble telescope around the Earth, in it’s 18th year of operation. The image shows a small portion of the nebula near the star cluster NGC 2074. “It lies about 170,000 light-years away near the Tarantula nebula, one of the most active star-forming regions in our local group of galaxies.” (Astronomy Mag.)

Gaseous filaments glow under cosmically intense ultraviolet radiation, and giant pillars of dust form canyons a hundred light years wide.