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Top 10 Space Science Photos - space.com

Pillars of Creation (M16)

What it is is a nursery for stars wrapped inside a giant nebula some 7,000 light-years from Earth. The pillars are columns of cool interstellar hydrogen gas and dust that double as incubators for new stars. The pillars have been carved out and are illuminated by ultraviolet light coming from hot, massive newborn stars that are unseen, above the top of the photo.

Earthrise over the Moon

The Lunar Orbiter 1 launched in 1966 to map the Moon's surface in preparation for human visits. While subsequent Apollo missions produced more vivid snapshots of Earth from the Moon, this robotic image holds one distinction: "That was the first time that we got a look at our own planet," says Van der Woude.

Supernova 1987A

This exploding star is on the verge of death. In a few decades, the stellar blast wave that shaped this view, as seen by Hubble, will have blown the structure apart as the star spits most of its mass into space.

Olympus Mons

Olympus Mons soars 15 miles (24 km) above the surface, dwarfing the largest terrestrial volcano, Mauna Loa, which is just 6 miles (9 km) high, including the portion of the volcano that extends underwater to the sea floor.

Mars Globe

While this 1995 Hubble telescope image is not the first (or last) full-globe view of the Red Planet, it was at the time the clearest one taken, and it stands today as an intriguing look at a place about which we love to speculate.

Eskimo Nebula

It's easy to see why this object got its name, its radiating tentacles resembling the warming fur of an Eskimo's parka. The Eskimo nebula is, officially, a planetary nebula, misnamed because their blurry features looked like planets when astronomers first spotted them with crude telescopes.

Volcanoes on Io

This Voyager 1 image, taken in March 1979 from about 304,000 miles away (490,000 km), shows a volcano tossing material 100 miles into Io's atmosphere. The brightness of the plume has been computer enhanced by NASA, but the relative color of the plume was preserved

Antennae Galaxies

Hubble has spent a good chunk of its time watching similar scenes of carnage painted on distant skies, as with these two colliding spiral galaxies.

Hubble Deep Field

"The Hubble Deep Field is also sort of the universe's wallpaper -- whatever direction you look the universe should resemble this pattern of a sea of seeming endless galaxies," Villard said. "What's staggering is that each little blob is the combined light of 100 billion stars."

Pale Blue Dot

"The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light." -- Carl Sagan From "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space," Random House, 1994