Amazing Space Photos

This is one of the largest panoramic images ever taken with Hubble's cameras, a 50-light-year-wide view of the central region of the Carina Nebula where a maelstrom of a star's birth and death is taking place.

Feel like you are being watched? This infrared image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows the Helix nebula, a cosmic starlet notable for its vivid colors and eerie resemblance to a giant eye.

In 2005, NASA's Hubble Telescope captured this image of the Crab Nebula, a six-light-year-wide expanding remnant of a star's supernova explosion. Japanese and Chinese astronomers witnessed this violent event in 1054.

Even galaxies get bullied. Here, a so-called "death star galaxy" blasts a nearby galaxy with a jet of energy. Scientists said that if this happened in the Milky Way, it would likely destroy all life on Earth.

This nebula is the glowing remains of a dying, sun-like star. This stellar relic is called the Eskimo Nebula because, when viewed through ground-based telescopes, it resembles a face surrounded by a fur parka

This image of the Whirlpool Galaxy is one of the sharpest Hubble has ever produced. The telescope has orbited the Earth for 15 years and has taken more than 700,000 images of the cosmos.

This is one of the universe's most photogenic galaxies, the Sombrero Galaxy. Its hallmark is a brilliant white, bulbous core encircled by thick dust lanes comprising the spiral structure of the galaxy.

Resembling the fury of a raging sea, this is actually a bubbly ocean of glowing hydrogen gas and small amounts of other elements such as oxygen and sulfur within the Omega or Swan Nebula.

This is one of the largest panoramic images ever taken with Hubble's cameras, a 50-light-year-wide view of the central region of the Carina Nebula where a maelstrom of a star's birth and death is taking place.

Comet Hale-Bopp passes over a rural Rice County, Kan., windmill, just north of Hutchinson, Kan., on Thurday, March 27, 1997.

The Hubble Space Telescope "caught" the Boomerang Nebula, which is a reflecting cloud of dust and gas with two nearly symmetric lobes of matter that are being ejected from a central star.

Astronomers have confirmed the presence of two new moons around the distant dwarf planet Pluto. Here, Pluto is in the center and Charon is just below it. The moons are named, from far right, Hydra and Nix, respectively.

This nebula is the glowing remains of a dying, sun-like star. This stellar relic is called the Eskimo Nebula because, when viewed through ground-based telescopes, it resembles a face surrounded by a fur parka.

A pair of huge interstellar "twisters" -- eerie funnels reminiscent of terrestrial tornadoes -- are seen in the heart of the Lagoon Nebula about 5,000 light-years from Earth.

The Red Square is among the most symmetrical objects ever observed. It was created by a dying star spewing its innards from opposite poles into space.

Sources: AP, NASA, Reuters, Space.com