Friends' Slides Collection: Set 006p: Astronomy photographs from Hubble Telescope
Hubble telescope's top ten greatest space photographs
The Sombrero Galaxy - 28 million light years from Earth - was
voted best picture taken by the Hubble telescope.  The
dimensions of the galaxy, officially called M104, are as
spectacular as its appearance.  It has 800 billion suns and is
50,000 light years across.
The Ant Nebula, a cloud of dust and gas whose technical name
is Mz3, resembles an ant when observed using ground-based
telescopes.  The nebula lies within our galaxy between 3,000
and 6,000 light years from Earth .
In third place is Nebula NGC 2392, called Eskimo because it
looks like a face surrounded by a furry hood.  The hood is, in
fact, a ring of comet-shaped objects flying away from a dying
star.  Eskimo is 5,000 light years from Earth.    
At four is the Cat's Eye Nebula, which looks like the
eye of disembodied sorcerer Sauron from Lord of the
Rings.
The Hourglass Nebula, 8,000 light years away,
has a pinched-in-the-middle look because the
winds that shape it are weaker at the centre.
In sixth place is the Cone Nebula.  The part pictured here
is 2.5 light years in length (the equivalent of 23 million
return trips to the Moon).    
The Perfect Storm, a small region in the Swan Nebula, 5,500
light years away, described as 'a bubbly ocean of hydrogen and
small amounts of oxygen, sulphur and other elements'.   
Starry Night, so named because it reminded astronomers of
the Van Gogh painting.  It is a halo of light around a star in the
Milky Way.  
The glowering eyes from 114 million light years away are the
swirling cores of two merging galaxies called NGC 2207 and IC
2163 in the distant Canis Major constellation.    
The Trif id Nebula.  A 'stellar nursery', 9,000 light years from
here, it is where new stars are being born.