Saturnebula!

How did I miss posting this?   This is NGC 6302, variously referred to the Bug Nebula, or the Butterfly Nebula, a bipolar (symmetric, two-lobed) planetary nebula located about 4000 light-years away, in the constellation Scorpius.  It is a grand, complex example, beautifully imaged here - one of the first images, in fact, from the newly refurbished Hubble Space Telescope.  This is an APOD image.  Click the image here to go to the APOD page.  Click the image there for a higher resolution version of the photo.

Saturnebula!

NGC 2818 is a strikingly attractive planetary nebula found in the southern constellation Pyxis (The Compass). The beautiful hues pictured here are the result of a sequence of exposures through narrow-band filters, highlighting emission from nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms showing as red, green, and blue in the image. This is an APOD image. Click through to see the APOD page, click the image there for a higher resolution version.

Non-Galactic, Non-Friday Post

Actually, in a sense this is still a galactic image, just from the interior of our galaxy; a weaselly construction I may just abuse if and when good galaxy images become too scarce for a weekly submission.






All that aside, on the left is a glorious, detailed image of the Cat's Eye (NGC 6543), a gorgeous planetary nebula half a light-year across and about three thousand light-years distant. This particular image has been created from archival Hubble data and reprocessed to accentuate details. The image on the right, from Wikipedia, shows how differently the imagery can ultimately appear, depending on how, exactly the digital data is processed. It also seems to illustrate how succesfully the details were shown in the other image, though I have no reason to assume that the two images were generated from the same source data.