Yeah, yeah. I’ve been slacking on the space porn lately, and for that I fall upon my blade. It pierces the jittery remnants of my heart, propelling me into action. Wait, how can I do that when I’m dead? Guilt motivates the corpses. Powerful agent.

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Pluto. It can’t catch a  break. Despite having like, a zillion moons (four) with like a million more found (a fifth), it still isn’t a pluto. What the hell is up with that.

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God bless the Hubble. For years it has been bringing us glorious snapshots of the glorious beyond. Stimulating the imagination while showing us what lies beyond the Big Blue Marble. This picture is no different. It is a look at  30 Doradus, which is “the brightest and most prolific star-forming region in our galactic neighborhood”. Hell yeah!

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Have you seen an aurora? I sure haven’t. My experience with them have been confined to Skyrim. Don’t get me wrong, those were gorgeous, I would just much prefer seeing one in person. Now, what could be more fantastic than that? Seeing one on a foreign planet.

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Enlarge. | Via.

It’s okay to get a little sexy on your 21st birthday! It’s one of the last times that you can get hammered, make some bad decisions, and use a birthday to support the claim. So in order to celebrate Hubble’s birthday which turns 21 years-old on April 24, astronomers have released this sexy image of two colliding galaxies.

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Behold the inner sanctum of Hell! You probably thought that the Devil lived in some dingy-ass cave, right? Shitty halls and screams? Naw, he lives here. Where is here? The Whirlpool Galaxy, but you can call it M51. We have one picture of it on the left, looking all safe and shit. On the right, however, we have its true form exposed. The sanctum of El Diablo.

The Hubble’s site explains the two different views:

The image at left, taken in visible light, highlights the attributes of a typical spiral galaxy, including graceful, curving arms, pink star-forming regions, and brilliant blue strands of star clusters. In the image at right, most of the starlight has been removed, revealing the Whirlpool’s skeletal dust structure, as seen in near-infrared light. This new image is the sharpest view of the dense dust in M51. The narrow lanes of dust revealed by Hubble reflect the galaxy’s moniker, the Whirlpool Galaxy, as if they were swirling toward the galaxy’s core.

Outstanding.

Hit the jump for a high-res version of the Devil’s Regions revealed.

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[Enlarge.]

Bad Astronomy posted a link to a recently posted picture over at the Hubble website. This gorgeous red ring is a celestial bauble, and the remnants of a particularly righteous supernova.

Hubble:

The delicate shell, photographed by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, appears to float serenely in the depths of space, but this apparent calm hides an inner turmoil. The gaseous envelope formed as the expanding blast wave and ejected material from a supernova tore through the nearby interstellar medium.

[cont]

Astronomers have concluded that the explosion was an example of an especially energetic and bright variety of supernova. Known as Type Ia, such supernova events are thought to result when a white dwarf star in a binary system robs its partner of material, taking on more mass than it is able to handle, so that it eventually explodes.

See kids. Don’t be greedy douches, or you’re going to explode in a wonderful, gorgeous red-ring of death. Let your brother have his toys this Christmas season! If you want to know more about how such a glorious celestial form comes to be, check out Phil Plait’s explanation over on Bad Astronomy. It is the mind warp.