The Crow: Antennae Galaxies are a pair of distorted colliding spiral galaxies about 70 million light-years away, in the constellation of Corvus (The Crow)
Drifter: Two very different galaxies are drifting through space together in this image. The peculiar galaxy pair is called Arp 116 which is composed of a giant elliptical galaxy known as Messier 60 or M60 (C) and a much smaller spiral galaxy, NGC 4647 (upper right)
Crash: This galaxy is having a bad millennium and its unlikely to improve any time soon. The upper left galaxy used to be a normal spiral galaxy, minding its own business, until the one toward its right, crashed into it
Light-years away: About 300 million light-years away, only four of these five galaxies are actually locked in a cosmic dance of repeated close encounters
The Swan: Located just beyond the tip of the tail of the constellation of Cygnus (The Swan), this butterfly-shaped cloud of glowing gas and dust is the wreckage of a star similar to the Sun
Cosmic collision: The unusual form seen here is the result of a cosmic collision with a smaller galaxy which plunged right through the heart of the larger one
Supernova: A new photo of Eta Carinae system's largest star suffering a near-death experience before it goes supernova in the near future. The star is once more visible to the naked eye at night, although it's nowhere near as bright as it was back in the 19th century
Clusters: Astronomers have caught two clusters full of massive stars that may be in the early stages of merging. The clusters are 170,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy to our Milky Way
Hot gas: Herbig-Haro 110 is a geyser of hot gas from a newborn star that splashes up against and ricochets off the dense core of a cloud of molecular hydrogen
Dying star: A photo of U Camelopardalis, a star nearing the end of its life located in the constellation of Camelopardalis
Wow: This composite image of a portion of the Tarantula Nebula's central cavity illustrates the profound effect new stars can have on their environment
Old: This image provided by NASA and taken by the Hubble Space Telescope shows previously unseen early galaxies including the oldest one at 13.3 billion years old
Hot stars: Peering deep inside the hub of the neighboring Andromeda galaxy, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered a large, rare population of around 8,000 hot, bright stars
Black hole: Two jets powered by the gravitational energy of a supermassive black hole in the core of the elliptical galaxy Hercules A
Sparkling: Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have photographed a festive-looking nearby planetary nebula called NGC 5189
The Furnace: Lying 45 million light-years away from Earth in the southern constellation of Fornax (The Furnace), this bright star-forming ring surrounds the heart of the barred spiral galaxy
The great eruption: Astronomers are watching a delayed broadcast of a spectacular outburst from the unstable, behemoth double-star system Eta Carinae, dubbed the 'Great Eruption'
