This festively colorful nebula, called NGC 604, is one of the largest known seething cauldrons of star birth seen in a nearby galaxy. NGC 604 is similar to familiar star-birth regions in our Milky Way galaxy, such as the Orion Nebula, but it is vastly larger in extent and contains many more recently formed stars. This monstrous star-birth region contains more than 200 brilliant blue stars within a cloud of glowing gases some 1,300 light-years across, nearly 100 times the size of the Orion Nebula.

Image Credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI)

Acknowledgment: D. Garnett (U. Arizona), J. Hester (ASU), and J. Westphal (Caltech)

• "Creating Hubble's Technicolor Universe"