Shortly after the Chandra X-ray Observatory opened its eye for the first time in 1999, the orbiting probe snapped its first picture of a supernova remnant about 190,000 light-years away that's lovingly called 1E 0102.2-7219—or E0102 for short.

—Image courtesy NASA/CXC/SAO

Yesterday, ten years to the day after the probe's July 23 launch, the Chandra team released this updated version of the supernova's portrait:

—X-ray (NASA/CXC/MIT/D.Dewey et al. & NASA/CXC/SAO/J.DePasquale); Optical (NASA/STScI)

In the immortal word of Keanu Reeves: Whoa.

The brilliant new picture (click here for a larger version) combines Chandra's x-ray data with a visible-light image from its orbiting partner the Hubble Space Telescope. Together the two orbiters show the supernova's hot outer blast wave as a blue halo around the cooler inner material, with bright stars glittering in the background.

The green blob in the lower right is a cloud of gas and dust being illuminated by one very massive star (not pictured), probably not unlike the one that went boom and created E0102.

While the x-ray data add some great visual details to the shot, Chandra also contributed to the scientific analysis of the remnant. The x-rays, for instance, have helped astronomers get a better picture of the geometry of the explosion.

That's because x-rays with different levels of energy shine differently for Chandra. Since energy levels are linked to direction, scientists can tell how the object's components are moving relative to each other.

To us, E0102 may look like a colorful cotton ball in space. But Chandra reveals that the supernova is actually shaped more like a cylinder, and we're simply seeing the rounded face. There's a nifty animation of this here, in case pictures speak loader than words...

Btw, in its ten years of data collection, it seems Chandra has done its share of capturing puffballs in outer space. Here's a "rogues gallery" of some of the more famous explosions:

Tycho's Remnant

• About 7,500 light-years away
• Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe saw light from the initial explosion in 1572
• Chandra snapped it in April 2003

—X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO, Infrared: NASA/JPL-Caltech; Optical: MPIA, Calar Alto, O.Krause et al.

Kepler's Remnant

• About 13,000 light-years away
• Astronomer Johannes Kepler was among the first to see it as a new object in the sky in 1604
• Chandra studied it from April to August 2006

—Image courtesy NASA/CXC/NCSU/S.Reynolds et al.

Cassiopeia A

• About 10,000 light-years away
• Discovered in the constellation Cassiopeia via radio observations in 1947
• Chandra snapped it in December 2007

—Image courtesy NASA/CXC/MIT/UMass Amherst/M.D.Stage et al.

SN1006

• About 7,000 light-years away
• The brightest supernova ever seen from Earth, witnessed in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East in A.D. 1006
• Chandra snapped it in April 2003

—X-ray: NASA/CXC/Rutgers/G.Cassam-Chenai, J.Hughes et al.; Radio: NRAO/AUI/NSF/GBT/VLA/Dyer, Maddalena & Cornwell; Optical: Middlebury College/F.Winkler, NOAO/AURA/NSF/CTIO Schmidt & DSS

—Image courtesy ESO

Going supernova is arguably the most popular way for a star to die. But stars like our sun actually end not with a bang, but a whimper [nods to T.S. Eliot].

These mid-size stars don't explode at the end of their lives, they swell, releasing shells of gas as they blossom into planetary nebulas, which for the record, don't have much to do with planets.

Such is the Helix, a widely imaged nebula that lies about 700 light-years away.

In a new picture taken by ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile, astronomers can see distant galaxies through the nebula's thinly spread gases.

Is it just me, or does this version of the Helix look like a giant space fish about to swallow us whole?

It seems fitting that in a year being celebrated worldwide as the 400th anniversary of telescopic astronomy, NASA and ESA have chosen one of Galileo's first loves, Jupiter, as their next top planet.

Cut-away images show the insides of Io, Ganymede, ...

In January of 1610 the famed Italian Galileo Galilei pointed a homemade 'scope at the heavens and witnessed something shocking: four "stars" moving in fixed paths around Jupiter.

What he saw were actually the gas giant's four biggest moons, which became known as the Galilean satellites—Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.

... Europa, and Callisto

—Images courtesy NASA/JPL

The tiniest of these, Europa, is only slightly smaller than Earth's moon. In fact, if it weren't for big, fat Jupiter's light drowning them out, people on Earth would be able to see all four of the satellites without the aid of a telescope.

Today NASA and ESA announced that Jupiter and its four famous moons will get priority as science targets for the next flagship mission, following in the footsteps of Cassini (Saturn) and New Horizons (Pluto).

Imagine trying to spot a moth flying around the rim of a searchlight. If the light is a few feet from you, there's a chance you would catch the occasional flicker of motion, but the moth would be largely hidden by the glare.

Now imagine the spotlight shines as bright as the sun and is several light-years away. Chances are all signs of that moth are obliterated.

Such is the challenge placed at the feet of those searching for habitable Earthlike worlds orbiting sunlike stars.

Prowling the poster hall here at the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Long Beach, I came across a group of people who hope to overcome the obstacles by sending a giant gold daisy into space.

As luck would have it, the weather just did not feel like playing nice with me today.

I was super excited to see the rain clear up over Washington, D.C., this morning, and I got a couple nice peeks of tonight's biggest full moon of the year as I was walking home.

By the time I got out on my balcony with a camera, however, an almost impenetrable blanket of clouds had swept over the Arlington skies, and that glorious moon played hide-and-seek with me for a good hour.

This was the best I could do before my frozen body insisted I go back inside and eat a hot meal.

8:43 p.m. EST
—Photo by Victoria Jaggard

Kinda spooky, I guess, but not very detailed, so I just had to try again.

By around 11 p.m. the clouds had cleared, and I braved the crisp winter air to snap a few more rounds.

Oops, Hubble did it again.

As the media touting Hubble's revival late last night, NASA engineers ran smack into Murphy's Law: A pair of seemingly unrelated glitches snarled efforts to fix the science data formatter, the bit on the space telescope that sends its collected information back to Earth.

The primary formatter had failed on September 27, so engineers had sent Hubble into safe mode to remotely switch to an onboard backup system.

It was smooth sailing until yesterday afternoon, when something snagged during calibration of two of the science instruments that feed data into the formatter.

"We experienced an issue late yesterday on Hubble that we're still troubleshooting," Goddard spokesperson Ed Campion told National Geographic News this morning.

"We've stopped trying to activate science."

NatGeo News reporter Anne Minard was right on top of the action—you can read her breaking report on the events posted this morning, as well as a more detailed followup based on an afternoon press conference.

No doubt the flurry of drama will revive concerns about the cost and effort of maintaining Hubble. It's an 18-year-old piece of equipment, after all, and it relies on human intervention via the also aging and highly controversial shuttle program to keep everything operational.

One of Hubble's most famous images, the "pillars of creation" in the Eagle nebula
—Photograph courtesy NASA, ESA, STScI, J. Hester and P. Scowen (Arizona State University)

But Hubble's successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, isn't due for launch until 2013, leaving quite a gap in data collection if we let the old boy go.

With the U.S. in the grip of an escalating financial crisis, will the public balk at the millions of dollars it will take to get Hubble once again up to its fullest potential? Or will the telescope's reputation for eye-popping visuals keep it afloat no matter the cost?

America, how much is Hubble worth to you?

Sometimes it must seem like the Hubble Space Telescope is a time traveler.

Within hours of Hubble making headlines because it shut itself down due to a serious mechanical failure, mission scientists released a survey of galactic diversity based on new Hubble images.

NGC 253, Sculptor Group galaxy, 13 million light-years away
—Image courtesy NASA, ESA, J. Dalcanton and B. Williams (University of Washington)

Using two of its powerful cameras, Hubble captured high-resolution views of 69 galaxies that lie 6.5 million to 13 million light-years away. This sounds pretty distant, but it's actually right in our cosmic backyard.

The project—delightfully named the ACS Nearby Galaxy Survey Treasury, or ANGST, program—aims to use the new, detailed views of old stars in nearby galaxies like a fossil record.

More distant galaxies are younger galaxies to Earth-based observers, because the light had to travel for millions of years to reach us, so what we see now is how a galaxy looked in it's early days.

The young/far galaxies are loaded with active star formation and are good models in general for figuring out how galaxies grow up.

By comparing the closer, geriatric galaxies to their younger cousins, scientists hope to trace how various types of galaxies might have evolved, as well as possibly getting a clearer picture of stellar life cycles. [Yes, I know I'm supposed to be talking about planets here, but you gotta have stars for planets to form, right?]

But, you might ask, NASA says Hubble is broken, so how is it still releasing new images?