6 stunning images of Milky Way captured by NASA

Peering deep into the heart of our Milky Way galaxy, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope reveals a rich tapestry of more than half a million stars.

NASA astronaut Don Pettit used a camera with low light and long duration settings to capture this image of the Milky Way appearing beyond Earth’s horizon.

This illustration shows the fundamental architecture of our island city of stars, the Milky Way galaxy: a spiral disk, central bulge, and diffuse halo of stars and globular star clusters. 

The region around the center of our Milky Way galaxy glows colorfully in this new version of an image taken by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is seen above the Doll House in this National Park Service photo from Canyonlands National Park.

This illustration shows a stage in the predicted merger between our Milky Way galaxy and the neighboring Andromeda galaxy.

Image source: NASA