Like a parrot perched on a pirate's arm, the Seagull Nebula resides in one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way.
This new image, released by the European Southern Observatory on February 6, shows a closeup of one of the "wings" of the Seagull Nebula. Red clouds of hydrogen gas glow from the intense ultraviolet radiation given off with the birth of stars.
Saturn's hexagon-shaped north pole is lit by the sun now that spring has come to the planet's northern hemisphere, as seen in a NASA picture released this week.
The 15,000-mile-wide (25,000-kilometer-wide) cloud formation, captured by the Cassini spacecraft's wide-angle camera in November, was initially spied during the Voyager missions in the 1980s. (See another Cassini picture of the hexagon.)
Frost avalanches usually occur at the onset of the Martian spring, when layers of carbon dioxide frost warm, causing ice and dust to cascade off of cliffs.
"While HiRISE has captured other frost avalanches before, they never cease to amaze, since it demonstrates that there are indeed active processes on the red planet," according to the HiRISE website. (Related: "First Mars Avalanches Seen In Action.")
Image courtesy U. Arizona/NASA
London gleams in a nighttime picture taken from the International Space Station on February 2.
Expedition 34 Flight Engineer Chris Hadfield captured the English city while flying about 240 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth.