Space Photos: Vote Early and Often

If your collection of space photographs has some gaps, this is your chance to fill at least one of them.

NASA has invited the public to vote on the next celestial object for the Hubble Space Telescope to photograph. There are six candidates, including two planetary nebulae (unrelated the planets, they’re the gaseous remains of stars in their death throes), a star-forming region, a spiral galaxy (NGC 5172), an edge-on view of a spiral galaxy (NGC 4289) and two galaxies “interacting”—or, to the dramatically-inclined, about to collide.

As I write this, the impending mash-up is winning. Do space aficionados have the sensibility of rubber-neckers fascinated by car crashes?