NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has revealed a new class of object in the universe -- a grouping of gigantic star clusters produced by the collision of galaxies. Images of the core of the peculiar galaxy Arp 220 show that stars are produced at a furious rate from the dust and gas supplied by the interaction of two galaxies.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has provided intriguing new clues to cataclysmic events in the history of the peculiar galaxy NGC 1275, located approximately 200 million light-years from Earth.

High resolution observations of the core of the globular cluster 47 Tucanae, made with the European Space Agency's Faint Object Camera (FOC) onboard NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (HST), provide new evidence that stars may collide and capture each other and gain a new "lease on life" in the process. The FOC observations reveal a surprisingly high concentration of a unique class of star called blue stragglers, which may evolve from "old age" back to a hotter and brighter "youth". These stars may also play a critical role in the dynamic evolution of the cluster's core.

Exposures taken through separate red, green, and blue filters and used to create a color image of Mars (lower right). The red filter shows the best surface detail. Because Mars' atmosphere scatters blue light (as on Earth) Martian surface detail is obscured in the blue filter exposure. The blue filter exposure does allow for clouds to be easily seen. A polar hood of clouds over Mars' north pole is evident, and a thin sheet of morning clouds is evident on the western limb (bottom).

This photograph, made with the Wide Field/Planetary Camera on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, reveals the detailed structure of a newly discovered jet of material streaming away from a young star in the Orion Nebula.

The European Space Agency's Faint Object Camera on board NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has provided astronomers with the most detailed image ever taken of the gravitational lens G2237 + 0305, sometimes referred to as the "Einstein Cross." The photograph shows four images of a very distant quasar which has been multiple-imaged by a relatively nearby galaxy acting as a gravitational lens. The angular separation between the upper and lower images is 1.6 arcseconds.

The European Space Agency's Faint Object Camera aboard NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, has successfully taken its first engineering test pictures of the heavens. This "first light" picture for the Faint Object Camera (FOC) is the culmination of several weeks of intensive check-out and testing of the camera, following the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) last April 24.

On the right is part of the first image taken with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope's (HST) Wide Field/Planetary Camera. It is shown with a ground-based picture from a Las Campanas, Chile, observatory of the same region of the sky. The Las Campanas picture was taken with a 100-inch telescope and it is typical of high-quality pictures obtained from the ground. All objects seen are stars within the Milky Way galaxy.