Butterfly Nebula

Red butterfly nebula on the black of deep space. Lovely NASA image in the public domain.

This public domain photo is from GRIN, the Great Images In NASA Collection within the NASA image archive.

This colorful image captures two stars in rapid orbit. These stars are orbiting so closely that the larger has stripped the outermost layers from the smaller star. These stripped gases make up the beautiful butterfly-like gas projections visible in this image. They have been blown outwards from the central stars by stellar winds.

This lovely image should have a wide range of uses including integration into background texture collages, canvas for illustrations, or wallpapers.

This image was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope – NASA. NASA is an Agency of the United States Government, therefore this image is in the public domain.

1.1 Megabyte JPG. Hosted by nasa.gov.

Butterfly Nebula

User Descriptions

  1. Arun Samuel.P
    03.15.10

    s we know, the word ‘nebula’ means unorganized stellar substances in space. It consists of two stars that looks like a giant red butterfly in space. These red clouds are nothing but few gases present in the space. They have been blown outwards by the central stars by stellar winds. Thanks to NASA photo-shoot.

  2. Walden
    03.22.10

    Bright stars prick through the solid darkness of black space that serves as the background of this photo. And to the center stretches the oblong nebula, slightly gathered at its center so that the ends flare outward to gain it the name of butterfly nebula. At the center, where the butterfly’s body would be, is an area of condensed brightness, purple radiating outwards to the orange of which the vast wings are made. The edges of the nebula are dimmer and seem to fade into the darkness, making the giant phenomenon look almost delicate and floating against the airless abyss. This photograph evokes a kind of detached wonder, the kind a student feels as they flip idly through their science text books where it could very well belong. There is a fleeting thought of the amazing technology behind the excellent photographic quality, but very little time is spent trying to appreciate the actual beauty of the strange feature. There is a sense of distance, both emotional and spacial; the butterfly nebula looks and feels so very far away that it is almost unrelated to the day to day goings on of the real world, hence losing relevance and becoming just a picture in a book.

  3. Staus
    03.27.10

    This is an image of a red nebula in space on a background of dark black sky with stars. The nebula has a light red pinkish circle shaped portion in the middle and it extends with a darker red portion to the lower left and upper right. The nebula almost has a bowtie shape, but the center portion is only a little bit thinner than the outer portions of the nebula. The nebula has a cloudy texture. There are several stars in the picture, and the stars are mostly red or orange in color. There are many bright stars but not many dim stars. Some of the stars are of medium dimness. Most of the stars are small and appear as simple dots on the image, but many are medium sized. The stars are least dense in the upper left corner of the image, are most dense behind and near the nebula. However, there are a few stars in the lower right corner of the image, which is a bit of disance from the nebula. There are a total of three stars that stand out as being larger than the other stars. One of these big stars is close to the nebula (it is below and to the left of it). The other two bigger stars are just a bit further away; one star being above and left of the nebula and the other star being below and right of it.

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