Sky Candy Baby Pictures

Zooom!

Journey into a technicolour dreamscape with Webb! Our destination is the stellar nursery NGC 7129, which contains numerous protostars and stars within its fields of gas and dust. Webb captured infrared light, which pierces through this matter that scatters or absorbs other types of light, revealing the sparkling stellar objects within the nebula ✨ 1/2

— ESA Webb Telescope (@ESA_Webb) October 12, 2026

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Can you imagine what we're going to see when NASA really gets the hang of this?

🛎️ It's quiz time! This starry view of the nearby star-forming region IC 348 🌟 is one of the largest Webb images shared with the public yet! https://t.co/Y6cvXe7AFz

— ESA Webb Telescope (@ESA_Webb) October 14, 2026

More baby pictures. We should get cigars.

NGC 7129 is a star factory in Cepheus, about 3,300 light-years away. Webb’s NIRCam took this frame through the dust. The release came on 6 October 2026. More than 100 stars here are under a million years old. The one in the middle, with the largest spike, is LkHα 234. It is a pre-main-sequence star of about 5 to 8 solar masses. It has mostly finished gathering mass and is contracting. It is not yet fusing hydrogen the way the Sun does. The gold cavity to the left is about 3.5 light-years across. Older outflows from that star carved it. The gas there is hot atomic hydrogen, lit by the star. To the right the hydrogen is still molecular and cooler. Protostars embedded in it drive jets that shock the gas and turn it red. The sharp ridge along the top of the cavity is a photodissociation region: far-ultraviolet light there splits H₂ into atoms. The grey gas is the coldest and densest. Stars have not formed in it yet. The spikes are diffraction in the telescope, not rays from the stars. The clip moves across the Webb plate. A light interpolation was applied. Nothing in the structure was added. Image: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Image Processing: A. Pagan (STScI) Edit: @Siccuma #NGC7129

— Science Art Empire (@Siccuma) October 16, 2026

This one's got a lot of variety.

Teams using JWST and Hubble recently released several dazzling photos highlighting the complex and ever-changing uniqueness of our universe. The images highlight stellar nurseries, galaxy clusters, an out-of-sync galaxy and a bubble-like nebula ⬇️ https://t.co/wFcE1lC0ia

— Haygen Warren (@haygenwarren) October 11, 2026

Baby galaxies. Think it had kittens?

Meet NGC 7331, a grand spiral hanging in the constellation Pegasus. Astronomers have long called it a twin of the Milky Way: similar in size, similar in mass, similar in the way its arms coil around a bright, golden heart. Tilted toward us, it looks almost like a cosmic whirlpool — dust lanes cutting through blue clusters of newborn stars, older light glowing in the core. But the photograph has a second trick up its sleeve. Just above the big galaxy, four much smaller smudges sit in a neat little line. Astronomers nicknamed them the fleas — not because they are insignificant, but because they look like specks dancing on the back of a much larger creature. Each “speck” is still an entire galaxy: NGC 7335** — a lenticular galaxy, that in-between shape that is neither fully spiral nor fully elliptical, like a smooth, glowing disk. NGC 7336** — a classic spiral, a smaller echo of the giant below it. NGC 7337** — a barred spiral, with a bar of stars running through its center and arms sweeping out from the ends. NGC 7340** — an elliptical, a rounded swarm of older stars packed into a dense, golden oval. They look like close neighbors. They are not. NGC 7331 sits only about 40–50 million light-years away. The four fleas lie far behind it, more than 300 million light-years distant. What we are seeing is a magnificent coincidence of alignment: four distant islands of stars stacked, from our point of view, just above a nearer twin of home. The universe is full of real families of galaxies. This one is a family only in the photograph. Image Credit: NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope; Image Processing: NASA/Aurel Costel Agapi

— Black Hole (@konstructivizm) October 3, 2026

Don't make fun just because it's the runt.

Twinkle, twinkle little galaxy… NGC 1827 is a low-mass galaxy that was captured as part of a Hubble observing program that will help scientists test predictions of cosmological models on smaller scales: https://t.co/zLJoIUmG1W https://t.co/ECIUIurC1c

— Hubble (@NASAHubble) October 16, 2026

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Got some great pictures from or around the Earth too.

Milky Way over Madagascar, a National Geographic collaboration with @BabakTafreshi to photograph the same subjects from Earth and space. Madagascar was a prime setting for its remoteness and natural beauty. https://t.co/yv3MUE1w09

— Don Pettit (@astro_Pettit) October 12, 2026

This has to be something that only shows up at very special times — the ISS has to be passing over the river at just the right moment.

Moonlight reflected off the Amazon river. At the proper angles in our orbit, we aboard @Space_Station can see brief silvery flashes atop water surfaces, illuminating even the darkest places on Earth. https://t.co/cHFGBF6571

— Don Pettit (@astro_Pettit) October 10, 2026

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Finally, a really dramatic launch shot. Krause is about the only photographer who seems to be competition for Andrew McCarthy.

Eight-minute long exposure as a Falcon 9 rocket launches Dragon and cargo toward the ISS from Cape Canaveral, Florida, creating a stunning 'jellyfish' effect visible across much of the eastern U.S. https://t.co/T5MrWqlKar

— John Kraus (@johnkrausphotos) October 13, 2026

That's it for this week. I realize this is probably repetitive. But come back next week for more Sky Candy, and don't forget the Sunday Supplement.

Oh, and comment; it makes the management happy.