The rest of this site looks at the sky over your head tonight. This room looks at the frontier — the deepest, sharpest views Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope have sent back, and what each one is actually showing you.
It looks like a mountain range at dusk, but those "peaks" are the edge of a vast cavity in a stellar nursery 7,600 light-years away, carved out by radiation from enormous young stars just above the frame. Webb sees in infrared, which slips through the dust that blocks visible light — so the specks of light dotting the gas are newborn stars no ordinary telescope could find. The tallest "peaks" are about seven light-years high.
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI · full resolution →The images that redefined what we can see. This collection grows as new releases land.
Every speck here is a galaxy, in a patch of sky you could cover with a grain of sand held at arm's length. The cluster in front is so massive its gravity bends and magnifies the light of galaxies far behind it — some of it over 13 billion years old, from near the dawn of the universe.
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
A dying Sun-like star, 2,500 light-years off, throwing off shells of gas and dust over thousands of years. Webb's infrared eyes revealed for the first time that a second, dimmer star is orbiting inside and stirring the rings — the kind of detail that rewrites how we picture a star's death.
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
The wreckage of a star that exploded in 1054 AD — bright enough that astronomers recorded it in daylight. Nearly a thousand years later the debris is still racing outward, 6,500 light-years away, lit from within by a city-sized neutron star spinning thirty times a second.
NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage TeamUnlike the rest of earthmoonsky, these images aren't pulled live — the great telescope images are released on their own schedule and chosen for impact, so this is a hand-curated gallery that grows over time. Every image links to its source at full resolution. Imagery courtesy of NASA, ESA, CSA, and the Space Telescope Science Institute.