The Tarantula Nebula

As seen by NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, it is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud which is one of our neighboring galaxies about 170,000 light-years away from Earth and is about 650 light-years in diameter. 

One of the brightest known nebula's, it containing numerous clouds of dust and gas and two bright star clusters.

The energy coming from it is center accounts for the brightness of the Nebula.  According to astronomers, the nebula is so bright that if it were only 1,000 light-years from Earth, it would cast a shadow the planets of our solar system.

Panorama view of Tarantula Nebula

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured this panoramic view of the Tarantula nebula.   The bright area is called "30 Doradus" and is considered to be a star-forming region. The differing colors between the two photo's is because of the use of certain filters Hubble used in the photo on the left.    The green areas would normally appear red.   

The vastness of space is mind boggling.

It is mind boggling indeed, when you consider that this photo is of a body that is 650 light years from side to side.  According to metric-conversions.org that works out to be 3,821,106,601,811,465 miles in diameter.   As you can see, it's hard to even visualize the vastness of this distance.  This is contained in a larger galaxy.  Our own milky way galaxy is 100,000 light years in diameter which is 587,862,554,124,840,832 miles, or 587.9 quadrillion miles.    

Above is another photo captured by astronomer Dr. Robert Fosbury of the
European Space Agency, using 100 photo's taken with special filters
and merged using a special program and several computers.