National Geographic's Space Photos This Week is akin to dangling a shiny object in front of a kitten - the kitten may not knowledgeably be able to discuss the refractive index of said object, but it can think "oooh, pretty"1 and play with it contentedly.

I am not any kind of expert on space, but I can look at the photos of jellyfish-lookalike planetary nebula and think "oooh, pretty" and share them with you.



This photo was taken by Hubble of the planetary nebula NGC 6210, about 6,500 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Hercules. Planetary nebulae are the clouds of dust and gas left over from "the quiet death of sunlike stars," which shed outer layers and leave behind dense cores called white dwarfs. This photo shows the inner region and white dwarf in "unprecedented detail," NASA says.

Check out the other neat photos on the site.

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1 After extensive research in the field, this is directly translated from "meow mew meooow."