A team of Australian researchers has built an unmanned observatory high on an Antarctic plateau that may provide images nearly the equal of Hubble's. That's the word from Nature, where University of New South Wales associate professor Michael Ashley, co-author of the paper, described the capabilities of the new viewing site. The paper's lead author is Dr. Jon S. Lawrence, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of New South Wales. The location is known as Dome C, 3250 meters above sea level on the Antarctic Plateau, at latitude 75 degrees south. Among its favorable characteristics are low infrared sky emission, dry and extremely cold air, few clouds and low dust and aerosol content. The upshot: much less 'star jitter.' All of these factors make the site, which is 400 meters higher than the South Pole, far better for viewing than the location of instruments currently in place in Chile, Hawaii and the Canary Islands. Having established the superiority of Dome C, the team now argues for...

NGC 6543 is called the Cat's Eye Nebula; it was one of the first planetary nebulae to be discovered. This gorgeous view from Hubble shows that it is also one of the most complex nebulae ever studied. You're looking at a Sun-like star at the very end of its life, losing its outer gaseous layers to create concentric clouds in ways that are still mysterious. Each bright ring is actually the edge of a spherical bubble of gas. Hubble used its Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) to make this image.

It looks bright enough to be a foreground star, but this supernova, called SN 2004dj, is 11 million light years away in a galaxy known as NGC 2403. Not particularly germane to interstellar propulsion or finding candidates for robotic probes, but simply too remarkable a sight to ignore. You can read more about this Hubble photograph here. From the press release issued by the Space Telescope Science Institute: The heart of NGC 2403 is the glowing region at lower left. Sprinkled across the region are pink areas of star birth. The myriad of faint stars visible in the Hubble image belong to NGC 2403, but the handful of very bright stars in the image belong to our own Milky Way Galaxy and are only a few hundred to a few thousand light-years away. This image was taken on Aug. 17, two weeks after an amateur astronomer discovered the supernova. What we're seeing here is the creation of heavy chemical elements like calcium, iron and gold, all of which, on Earth and elsewhere, came from...