Space Pictures This Week: Galaxy Tendrils, Star Glob

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Galaxy's Dark Tendrils

Image courtesy NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration

Pink pockets of star formation glow like roses in a briar patch in a new Hubble Space Telescope picture of the elliptical galaxy Centaurus A.

Released Thursday, the image shows dark tendrils of dust weaving through the galactic disk. Hubble's view combines ultraviolet through near-infrared wavelengths to show how the dense lanes are dotted with young, blue star clusters normally hidden by dust.

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Green Ring Nebula

Image courtesy NASA/Caltech

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has spied a glowing green ring in blackest night: a nebula called RCW 120.

Seen in a newly released infrared picture, the nebula is a bubble of gas and dust being sculpted by powerful radiation from a very massive central star. Although it's barely a twinkle in infrared, the normally bright, bluish star is emitting rays so strong that they're stripping electrons from surrounding hydrogen atoms, causing the charged gas inside the ring to glow red.

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Stellar Glob

Image courtesy ESO/INAF-VST

This new, highly detailed portrait of the globular star cluster Omega Centauri is among the first images released by the European Southern Observatory's VLT Survey Telescope, or VST.

A new addition to ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile, the VST is a 2.6-meter telescope with a huge 268-megapixel camera at its heart. The telescope's extremely wide field of view encompasses even the faint outer regions of the star cluster, allowing astronomers to see about 300,000 stars in one frame.

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Volcano's Fury

Image courtesy ASTER/NASA

A dense streamer of ash looms over Chile and Argentina in a NASA satellite picture of the erupting Puyehue volcano (map) released June 14.

The volcano roared to life June 4, forcing thousands to evacuate and grounding flights across several South American countries. The expanding ash cloud eventually got lofted by high-level winds, which carried ash particles as far away as Australia, disrupting air traffic.

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Honoring the Fallen

Image courtesy MSSS/Caltech/NASA

A new mosaic of images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows the path (yellow) of the Mars rover Opportunity since it landed on the red planet in 2004. The rover is headed for the 14-mile-wide (22-kilometer-wide) impact basin dubbed Endeavour Crater, about 2.2 miles (3.5 kilometers) from its landing site.