NASA Releases Halloween Gallery of Cosmic Images

NASA marked Halloween with a gallery of space images whose shapes evoke pumpkins, eyes, skulls and ghosts. The Sun’s jack-o’-lantern appearance comes from bright active regions associated with intense magnetic fields, while images from Hubble and Chandra show objects including the eye-shaped planetary nebula MyCn18, the Ghost Head Nebula and the Perseus galaxy cluster, whose X-ray features resemble eyes in a skull. Other seasonal images include the Pillars of Creation in infrared and a pulsar nebula shaped like a reaching hand. Though these forms look eerie, they reveal real processes such as stellar activity, dying stars and hot gas around galaxies.