Iridescent Glory of Nearby Helix Nebula Poster

This composite picture is a seamless blend of ultra-sharp NASA Hubble Space Telescope images combined with the wide view of the Mosaic Camera on the National Science Foundation's 0.9-metre telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory, part of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, near Tucson, Ariz. Astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute assembled these images into a mosaic. The mosaic was then blended with a wider photograph taken by the Mosaic Camera. The portrait offers a dizzying look down what is actually a trillion-mile-long tunnel of glowing gases. The fluorescing tube is pointed nearly directly at Earth, so it looks more like a bubble than a cylinder. A forest of thousands of comet-like filaments, embedded along the inner rim of the nebula, points back toward the central star, which is a small, super-hot white dwarf. The radiant tie-die colours correspond to glowing oxygen (blue) and hydrogen and nitrogen (red). To capture the sprawling nebula, Hubble had to take nine separate snapshots. Based on the nebula's distance of 650 light-years, its angular size corresponds to a huge ring with a diameter of nearly 3 light-years. That's approximately three-quarters of the distance between our Sun and the nearest star. Credit: NASA, NOAO, ESA, the Hubble Helix Nebula Team, M. Meixner (STScI), and T.A. Rector (NRAO). For more information, visit http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2003/11/image/a/