n-a-s-a:

M106 Close Up

Credit: Composite Image Data - Hubble Legacy Archive; Adrian Zsilavec, Michelle Qualls, Adam Block / NOAO / AURA / NSF

“ M106: An island universe: a spiral galaxy around 30 thousand light-years across located only about 21 million light-years beyond the stars of the Milky Way.”

n-a-s-a:

NGC 602 and Beyond

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

rhamphotheca:

NGC 7049 - Dust and Lace in Space

image : NASA, ESA and W. Harris (McMaster Univ., Ont., Canada)

This beautiful backlit web of dust and stars is NGC 7049, a galaxy in the constellation of Indus in the southern sky. Sprinkled around 7049 are brilliant globular clusters, collections of stars that orbit the galaxy. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope snapped this photograph in 2009.

(via: LiveScience)

the-star-stuff:

Beside a Giant

Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, looks small here, pictured to the right of the gas giant in this Cassini spacecraft view. 

Titan (3,200 miles, or 5,150 kilometers across) is in the upper right. Saturn’s rings appear across the top of the image, and they cast a series of shadows onto the planet across the middle of the image. 

The moon Prometheus (53 miles, or 86 kilometers across) appears as a tiny white speck above the rings in the far upper right of the image. The shadow cast by Prometheus can be seen as a small black speck on the planet on the far left of the image, between the shadows cast by the main rings and the thin F ring. The shadow of the moon Pandora also can be seen on the planet south of the shadows of all the rings, below the center of the image towards the right side of the planet. Pandora is not shown here. 

This view looks toward the southern, unilluminated side of the rings from about 1 degree below the ringplane. 

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

(via eruptedrainbow)

(Source: thevalleydad, via lolpuberty)

bfastwithtiffany:

At first glance it seems this boat has been blasted into space and its crew is floating amongst the stars.

But this picture was actually taken 150ft underground - in a pitch-black cave illuminated by glow-worms.

The breathtaking limestone caves in Waitomo, New Zealand, are home to hundreds of thousands of the beetles - which light up the caverns like bright blue stars.

(via crevan-grietje)