Published May 14, 2025 4:46 AM Save This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope Picture of the Week features a sparkling cloudscape from one of the Milky Way’s galactic neighbours, a dwarf galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud. ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Murray This stunning new image from the Hubble Space Telescope might look like cotton candy, but in fact it’s part of a nebula in a next door galaxy. Located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way which is around 160,000 light-years away, this nebula consists of dust and gas that glows in different colors which indicate different physical processes at work. If you’re curious about how Hubble produces such vivid and colorful images and whether the colors are real or not, it helps to understand how telescope cameras work. Unlike the camera on your phone, for example, Hubble doesn’t just point at an object and snap an image. Instead, its instruments like the Wide Field Camera 3, which produced this image, take multiple observations of the same object using different filters. Recommended Videos Each filter restricts the light being observed to just particular wavelengths. In this case, five different filters were used, covering wavelengths that the human eye can see, called optical wavelengths, as well as some in the ultraviolet and infrared. Related