What better way to end than with some examples of said beauty and utility? After all that reading, we'll leave you with a few glamour shots of our favorite nebula: Messier 16, better known as the ...

a young planetary nebula located about 8,000 light-years away, taken with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) aboard the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). Crab Nebula: This Hubble image ...

The glow of the Sh2-54 nebula—about 6,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Serpens—was captured in infrared by the 67-million-pixel InfraRed CAMera on the 4.1-meter Visible and ...