Hubble Desktop Wallpaper Pictures

It does look like a horsehead, doesn't it? This cold, dark cloud of gas and dust is silhouetted against another nebula. That bright area at the top left edge? It's a young star still embedded in a nursery of gas and dust.

No big deal. You're just looking at a pillar of gas in the Carina Nebula that's covered by the light of hot, massive stars. The radiation and fast winds from those stars sculpt the pillar and cause new star formation within it.

What a show-off. This detailed picture of the Helix Nebula shows a web of threads that are embedded in a colorful red and blue gas ring around the dying star. Did you know? The Helix is one of the nearest nebulae to Earth.

How cool! This Cat's Eye Nebula — one of the first planetary nebulae discovered — has a very complex form. Essentially it gets its shape from its 11 rings of gas.

It may take Saturn 29 years to journey around the sun, but its tilt lets us see its rings from different angles. The lowest image on the left shows its northern hemisphere's Fall season, while the top right image shows its Winter.

This was Hubble's 20th anniversary picture, and it shows a mountain of dust and gas rising in the Carina Nebula. A lot is going on: the top of a pillar of cool hydrogen is being worn away by the radiation of nearby stars, and the stars within the pillar are unleashing jets of gas that stream from the peaks.

It didn't get its name for nothing. Here, the red spots of the Whirlpool Galaxy are bright star clusters that are shedding light emitted by hydrogen atoms, and "dust spurs" are branching out around the spiral arms.

This nebula may be known as the Bug Nebula, but when its gas races across space at more than 600,000 miles an hour, it forms the shape of a celestial butterfly. Beautiful!

Whoa! Known as Eight Burst because it looks like a figure-eight shape through amateur telescopes, this planetary nebula is visible in the southern hemisphere. Here, gases are moving away from the dying star at its center at a speed of nine miles per second.

This so-called double cluster is made from a large cluster of stars located near a smaller cluster. The large one is 50 million years old, and the other is only four million years old. They're surrounded by gas believed to have been created by the explosion of massive stars.

Oh this? It's just 3,000 stars of different sizes forming in the Orion Nebula, a cloud of gas and dust. Fun fact: some of the stars have never been seen in visible light.