Photos: It's Always the Fourth of July in Space

A view of earth from MESSENGER’s Dual Imaging System. The wide-angle camera records light at eleven different wavelengths, including visible and infrared light. The image above substitutes infrared light for blue light

This composite of 30 photos of the Tarantula Nebula, contains data from three telescopes, Chandra (blue), Hubble (green), and Spitzer (red). Located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, the Tarantula Nebula is one of the largest star-forming regions close to the Milky Way.

Working with astronomical image processors at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., renowned astro-photographer Robert Gendler has taken science data from the Hubble Space Telescope archive and combined it with his own ground-based observations to assemble a photo illustration of the magnificent spiral galaxy M106.

Hubble’s 24th birthday shot of Monkey Head Nebula. This cloud of gas and dust lies about 6400 light-years away in the constellation of Orion. Nebulas like this one are popular targets for Hubble – their colorful plumes of gas and fiery bright stars create ethereally beautiful pictures.

The Coronet cluster is one of the nearest and most active regions of ongoing star formation at only about 420 light-years away. The Coronet contains a loose cluster of a few dozen young stars with a wide range of masses and at various stages of evolution.

The bright southern hemisphere star, RS Puppis, is surrounded by reflective dust. Hubble took a series of photos of light flashes rippling across the nebula in a phenomenon known as a "light echo."

Astronomers used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to photograph the iconic Horsehead Nebula in an infrared light to mark the 23rd anniversary of the famous observatory's launch aboard the space shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990.

The rate of star formation is so high that the Antennae Galaxies are said to be in a state of starburst, a period in which all of the gas within the galaxies is being used to form stars. Clouds of gas are seen in bright pink and red, surrounding the bright flashes of blue star-forming regions.

This is a Hubble Space Telescope composite image of a supernova explosion in the galaxy M82. At a distance of approximately 11.5 million light-years from Earth it is the closest supernova of its type discovered in the past few decades.

This new Hubble image shows NGC 1566, a galaxy located approximately 40 million light-years away in the constellation of Dorado. This image was taken by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) in the near-infrared part of the spectrum.

This is a compact star forming region in the constellation Cygnus. A newly-formed star called S106 IR is shrouded in dust at the centre of the image, and is responsible for the surrounding gas cloud’s hourglass-like shape and the turbulence visible within. Light from glowing hydrogen is coloured blue in this image.

The Antennae galaxies, located about 62 million light-years from Earth, are shown in this composite image. The X-ray image from Chandra shows huge clouds of hot, interstellar gas, which have been injected with rich deposits of elements from supernova explosions.

ESO's Very Large Telescope has captured a detailed view of a star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud—one of the Milky Way's satellite galaxies.

NASA’s Sojourner robotic rover examining a boulder on Mars’s Chryse Planitia, as imaged by its parent spacecraft, Pathfinder, after landing on the planet on July 4, 1997. Parts of Pathfinder’s solar arrays and the rover’s down ramp are in the foreground.