Large Magellanic Cloud

These amazing deep space images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, have lain hidden in data vaults. That was until the European Space Agency opened them up to the public, invited skywatchers and awarded prizes to the top ten entries.

Josh Lake of the United States won with this awesome image of NGC 1763, part of the N11 star-forming region of the Large Magellanic Cloud.

The Hubble had over a million observations since he launched 22 years ago.

“The response was impressive, with almost 3000 submissions,” the ESA said in a press release. “More than a thousand of these images were fully processed: a difficult and time-consuming task. We’ve already started featuring the best of these in our Hubble Picture of the Week series.”

 Messier 77
Second prize: Messier 77 produced by Andre van der Hoeven, of the Netherlands.

newborn star XZ Tauri
Third prize: The image of newborn star XZ Tauri submitted by Judy Schmidt of the U.S., was the jury’s favorite.

mosaic of Hubble images showing Chamaeleon I

Fourth prize: Renaud Houdinet of France submitted this hugely ambitious mosaic of Hubble images showing Chamaeleon I.

Image of spiral galaxy Messier 96

Fifth prize: Robert Gendler took fifth place with an image of spiral galaxy Messier 96.

via universetoday