This first image is the Flame Nebula (NGC 2024), in the consellation of Orion — and that bright blue star towards the right is one of three stars making up Orion's Belt. Normally, you can't see the young stars at the nebula's core with visible light, but VISTA's infrared camera shows them perfectly. [ESO via Universe Today]

Here's the Fornax Cluster of galaxies, one of the closest galaxy clusters beyond our own grouping. "At the lower-right is the elegant barred-spiral galaxy NGC 1365 and to the left the big elliptical NGC 1399, surrounded by a swarm of faint globular clusters."

And here's a look deep into the dusty heart of the Milky Way galaxy, through the constellation of Saggitarius. A million stars are revealed in this image.

Phil Plait over at the Bad Astronomy blog explains further:

They pointed Hubble at a fairly empty region of space, one where very few stars are seen. Then they unleashed the new Wide Field Camera 3 (called WFC3 for short) on it, taking images in infrared wavelengths just outside what the human eye can see… and they let it stare at that spot for a solid 48 hours.

The result? This picture, showing galaxies flippin' everywhere, some seen a mere 600 million years after the Big Bang itself. Because the Universe is expanding, distant galaxies appear to recede from us, and their light gets stretched out. This Doppler Effect - the same thing that makes the sound of a car engine drop in pitch when it passes you at high speed - changes the colors we see from these far-flung galaxies, so their ultraviolet light, for example, gets stretched into visible and even infrared wavelengths. What you are seeing here is actually more energetic light emitted by galaxies that's lost energy traveling across the expanding Universe, so by the time it gets here it's infrared.

So the colors are not "real" in this image; they've been translated into red, green, and blue so we can see them. The reddest objects in the image are most likely the farthest away, and may be as much as 13 billion light years away.

Thirteen billion. With a B.

Plait's deconstruction of this epic photo is worth reading in its entirety... once you're done staring and contemplating the vastness of a cosmos that barely notices the eyeblink of our existence. [Hubblesite via Bad Astronomy Blog]

An earlier version of this panoramic image was an Astronomy Picture Of The Day in 2001, but the Panorama 2.0 is much, much more detailed, and Mellinger has eliminated some distortions and other problems in the original image.

According to a press release from the University of Chicago Press:

Piecing together 3000 individual photographs, a physicist has made a new high-resolution panoramic image of the full night sky, with the Milky Way galaxy as its centerpiece. Axel Mellinger, a professor at Central Michigan University, describes the process of making the panorama in the forthcoming issue of Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. An interactive version of the picture can viewed on Mellinger's website.

"This panorama image shows stars 1000 times fainter than the human eye can see, as well as hundreds of galaxies, star clusters and nebulae," Mellinger said. Its high resolution makes the panorama useful for both educational and scientific purposes, he says.

Mellinger spent 22 months and traveled over 26,000 miles to take digital photographs at dark sky locations in South Africa, Texas and Michigan. After the photographs were taken, "the real work started," Mellinger said.

Simply cutting and pasting the images together into one big picture would not work. Each photograph is a two-dimensional projection of the celestial sphere. As such, each one contains distortions, in much the same way that flat maps of the round Earth are distorted. In order for the images to fit together seamlessly, those distortions had to be accounted for. To do that, Mellinger used a mathematical model-and hundreds of hours in front of a computer.

Another problem Mellinger had to deal with was the differing background light in each photograph.

"Due to artificial light pollution, natural air glow, as well as sunlight scattered by dust in our solar system, it is virtually impossible to take a wide-field astronomical photograph that has a perfectly uniform background," Mellinger said.

To fix this, Mellinger used data from the Pioneer 10 and 11 space probes. The data allowed him to distinguish star light from unwanted background light. He could then edit out the varying background light in each photograph. That way they would fit together without looking patchy.

The result is an image of our home galaxy that no star-gazer could ever see from a single spot on earth. Mellinger plans to make the giant 648 megapixel image available to planetariums around the world.

[University of Chicago via Axel Mellinger via Examiner]

The diffuse X-ray light suffusing the image comes from gas that has been heated by stellar explosions, massive young stars — and outflows powered by the supermassive blackhole at the heart of the galaxy, Sagittarius A. Scientists believe Sagittarius A gave off giant X-ray flares 50 years and 300 years earlier. (So when we finally visit the center of the galaxy searching for the mythical planet Sha-Ka-Ree in order to meet God and ask him why he wants a spaceship, we should time our visit to avoid one of those irregular X-ray bursts.) [Chandra]

Gelatinous orbs, etc. A downloadable montage of all four, at the link. [Hubble]

A clash among members of a galactic grouping called Stephan's Quintet.

A panoramic portrait of a colorful assortment of 100,000 stars residing in the crowded core of Omega Centauri

An eerie pillar of star birth in the Carina Nebula rises from a sea of greenish-colored clouds.

Writing in the new issue of Nature, the researchers explain that Andromeda is surrounded by a halo of remnants from other galaxies, and this provides evidence for the "hierarchical" model of galaxy development, where bigger galaxies grow by eating smaller ones:

In hierarchical cosmological models1, galaxies grow in mass through the continual accretion of smaller ones. The tidal disruption of these systems is expected to result in loosely bound stars surrounding the galaxy, at distances that reach 10–100 times the radius of the central disk2, 3. The number, luminosity and morphology of the relics of this process provide significant clues to galaxy formation history4, but obtaining a comprehensive survey of these components is difficult because of their intrinsic faintness and vast extent. Here we report a panoramic survey of the Andromeda galaxy (M31). We detect stars and coherent structures that are almost certainly remnants of dwarf galaxies destroyed by the tidal field of M31. An improved census of their surviving counterparts implies that three-quarters of M31's satellites brighter than Mv = -6 await discovery. The brightest companion, Triangulum (M33), is surrounded by a stellar structure that provides persuasive evidence for a recent encounter with M31. This panorama of galaxy structure directly confirms the basic tenets of the hierarchical galaxy formation model and reveals the shared history of M31 and M33 in the unceasing build-up of galaxies.

And here's a cool looking picture of Andromeda's orbit that they released:

Image of Triangulum Galaxy from NASA.

Scientists now believe that the supermassive black holes at the center of young galaxies throw off immense heat as matter falls into them. This heat illuminates the surrounding gas, as seen in the picture above. Interstellar gases, drawn by gravity, cool off and condense, forming new stars. But eventually, the "superblobs" of gas surrounding the galaxy get too hot, and this forces the growth of the galaxy to slow down, scientists say. Here are some stills from a new animation illustrating the process, to go along with a paper in the July 10 issue of The Astrophysical Journal. The stills also have more info in the captions:

[National Geographic]

Okay, probably not any time soon. But I still think we should build a security fence or something around our galaxy — maybe out of antimatter. I saw in Angels And Demons that it's easy to make lots of antimatter, and if you can put it in a suitcase, you ought to be able to build a wall out of it. [European Southern Observatory]

According to NASA, studying NGC 2841 has helped an international team of astronomers discover that stars flow out of the "hot, dense nurseries" and then disperse to form the smooth distribution pattern that we usually see in similar spiral galaxies. This image is a composite of three different images from the Spitzer Space Telescope. The shorter wavelengths are represented in blue, and the show the oldest stars, plus foreground stars in our own galaxy. Green represents the medium wavelengths, and red is the longest wavelengths. [Spitzer Space Telescope]

This false-color composite image consists of images from the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (blue), the Hubble Space Telescope (green), the Spitzer Space Telescope (red), and the Chandra X-ray Observatory (purple). The image was created in 2006, but NASA re-released it over the weekend, as part of a celebration of the International Year Of Astronomy 2009. [NASA]

With astronomers still using sky surveys from the 1950s, it was obvious they needed a new approach to mapping the universe. Eight years ago, the Sloane Survey became that new approach. "Nobody's ever done anything like this before," administrator Bruce Gillespie told the Los Angeles Times. "They'll still be looking at this data in 50 years."

The Survey's Sky Server allows you to explore the universe in multiple ways, focusing on the 2 billion light-years closest to Earth. If you know what you're doing, you can even search particular stretches of the universe.

The big challenge in mapping the universe is to determine the distance between objects, and to do that, researchers used aluminum plates drilled with holes to represent where stars and galaxies were. The survey has already told us about the existence of dark energy, and the three dimensional model shows what's not readily apparent from the night sky: namely, that galaxies are clearly gathered into clusters. We're also fascinated by the Great Wall in space, which spans 1 billion light years and has over six million gift shops.

As Bender so aptly put it: "First I was God, then I met God." Here's a gallery to let you have the Bender experience yourself. Just remember to drop acid before viewing.

The Survey's Website [Sloane Digital Sky Survey]

Images by NASA/JPL-Caltech and AP/NASA. [JPL]

These composite images, including data from the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array, give new insight into how stars can appear in a galaxy's backwoods. The Galaxy Evolution Explorer is an ultraviolet survey telescope. Its observations, shown here in blue and green, highlight the galaxy's farthest-flung clusters of young stars up to 140,000 light-years from its center. The Very Large Array observations show the radio emission in red. Images by NASA. [Galex]

The whole picture occupies a space of 100 million light years and this computer simulation "paints" the densest areas red. The yellow lines show the intensity of the galaxies' velocities as they fall into the highest-density area. The speed of the galaxies' rush towards the center of the structure depends on the the balance between dark matter, dark energy and the overall expansion of the universe. Astronomers are learning how to measure this "infall pattern" by using a large survey of galaxies at different epochs. [European Southern Observatory]

[Hubblesite]