Amazing shots of the Milky Way and beyond

This most recent image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope of the middle of the Milky Way offers an extraordinary look at a massive star cluster. (NASA came up with a nifty description - likening it to stars gathering in the `downtown' area of the Milky Way.

37 million light years away, a spiral arm segment of the Sunflower galaxy, also known as Messier 63. This image was taken in infrared light.

An image of the central region of our Milky Way galaxy. This infrared image highlights in dramatic fashion the swirling dusty clouds that form the core of the region.

Three baby stars in the center of our Milky Way galaxy are the first to be discovered in the region. NASA reported that earlier attempts to locate the stars were unsuccessful because of the presence of dust between us and the galaxy's core.

This one technically doesn't qualify as a shot from the Milky Way - but it's definitely in the same neighborhood. The so-called Maffei 2 almost invisible to optical telescopes as the foreground dust clouds in the Milky Way blocks about nearly all of its visible light.

Spheres of carbon, called buckyballs were discovered in a planetary nebula beyond our own Milky Way galaxy. In the infrared photo of the Small Magellanic Cloud shown here, an artist's illustration, with two call outs: The middle one represents a magnified view of an example of a planetary nebula, while the one on the right shows an even further magnified depiction of buckyballs, which consist of 60 carbon atoms arranged like soccer balls.

In this infrared portrait of the Small Magellanic Cloud, astronomers can their first close look at the stars and dust which predominate this this satellite galaxy to our Milky Way galaxy, some 200,000 light-years away.

A small part of a survey of our Milky Way galaxy is presented in this image. The young stellar objects captured by circles were used to estimate how quickly new stars are being born in the Milky Way. The data was subsequently plugged into a computer simulation of galactic star formation. The results were published in the February 10, 2010 issue of <a href="http://iopscience.iop.org/2041-8205/710/1/L11">The Astrophysical Journal Letters.</a>