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Hubble’s Celestial Snow Globe

This Hubble Space Telescope image of globular cluster M79 is a combination of observations taken in 1995 and 1997 by Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. The red, green, and blue colors used to compose the image represent a natural view of the cluster. Credit: NASA and ESA; Acknowledgment: S. Djorgovski (Caltech) and F. Ferraro (University of Bologna)

This Hubble Space Telescope image of globular cluster M79 is a combination of observations taken in 1995 and 1997 by Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. The red, green, and blue colors used to compose the image represent a natural view of the cluster. Credit: NASA and ESA; Acknowledgment: S. Djorgovski (Caltech) and F. Ferraro (University of Bologna)

It’s beginning to look a lot like the holiday season in this NASA Hubble Space Telescope image of a blizzard of stars, which resembles a swirling snowstorm in a snow globe. The stars are residents of the globular star cluster Messier 79, or M79, 41,000 light-years from Earth, in the constellation Lepus. The cluster is also known as NGC 1904. Globular clusters are gravitationally bound groupings of as many as 1 million stars...

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