Arachnophilia

Over the past few months I've written about various nebulae that are busily forming stars. Orion is a great one, NGC 604 in the Triangulum Galaxy is another. But in nearby space, the great grand-daddy of them all is the vast, sprawling Tarantula Nebula. Located 170,000 light years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud -- a satellite galaxy to our Milky Way -- it is churning out stars at a mind-numbing rate. Astronomers pointed Hubble into its heart (it's far too big to be seen all at once by Hubble) and got quite an eye full: