NASA / ESA / AURA / STScI

The Horsehead Nebula shines in a Hubble Space Telescope image that marks this month's 23rd anniversary of the orbiting observatory's launch.

Astronomers have come out with a Horsehead Nebula of a different color to celebrate the Hubble Space Telescope's 23rd birthday.

The iconic nebula in the constellation Orion, about 1,500 light-years away, can be seen even through small telescopes. In visible light, it's a dark dust cloud in the shape of a horse's head, silhouetted against a backdrop of glowing hydrogen gas. But the Horsehead takes on a completely different look in the new view released Friday.

"This image was taken in the infrared," Joe Liske, an astronomer from the European Southern Observatory, explains in a video introducing the picture. "In infrared light, we can pierce right through some of the bulky plumes of dusty material which usually mask and obscure the inner regions of the Horsehead. The result is this rather fragile-looking structure, made of delicate, wispy folds of gas — very different to the nebula's appearance in the visible."

The infrared glow, captured by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3, lights up the nebula's clouds from within. Liske says it's "a fitting celebration of an incredible 23 years of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope."

The Hubble team traditionally releases an eye-popping shot to celebrate the anniversary of the space telescope's launch on April 24, 1990. As part of this year's celebration, the Hubble Heritage Project asked astronomers around the world to send in their own Horsehead Nebula photos, and you can see the collection via Flickr and Tumblr.

Like a veteran racehorse, Hubble is hitting its stride — but that hasn't always been the case. The first couple of years of operation were hampered by a flaw in the telescope's main mirror. Equipment to compensate for the problem was installed during a crucial series of spacewalks 20 years ago, in 1993. The shuttle Atlantis paid a final servicing visit to Hubble in 2009, and the telescope has been working just fine since then.

Hubble operations have been extended through 2016 — and if the telescope remains in good working order, it's likely to continue being funded at least until 2018, when the $8.8 billion James Webb Space Telescope is scheduled for launch. Eventually, Hubble will have to be sent down to a fiery doom. But who knows? Maybe the old telescope will hang around to experience life after 30.

Slideshow: Classic Hubble Hits

NASA / ESA / STSI via Reuters

See the Hubble Space Telescope's best-known images.

Launch slideshow

More Hubble birthday gifts:

• 22 years: Panorama of the Tarantula Nebula
• 21 years: Raise your glass for Hubble's birthday
• Cosmic Log archive on Hubble Space Telescope

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / SSI

Saturn and its rings glow in a backlit, enhanced-color image from the Cassini orbiter. The picture combines images that were acquired using infrared, red and violet filters on Oct. 17. Two of Saturn's moons, Enceladus and Tethys, sparkle on the left side of the planet.

The holiday season is bringing beautiful baubles from outer space, including an unconventional view of Saturn from the Cassini orbiter, a gaudy nebula from the Hubble Space Telescope and a loopy picture of a supernova's leftovers. You can even send your own celestial season's greetings.

The Saturn picture, released today, marks the first time Cassini captured a backlit view of the ringed planet since 2006. That earlier photo made a huge splash, in part because the planet Earth could just barely be seen as a pale blue dot off to the side. This time, Earth is hidden behind Saturn, but you can spot two moons just to the left and below the planet: The closer speck is Enceladus, and Tethys is farther down and to the left.

This isn't the view that human eyes would see: Cassini's wide-angle camera snagged this picture in infrared, red and violet wavelengths from a distance of 500,000 miles (800,000 kilometers) behind Saturn on Oct. 17. The various views were assigned different colors in the visible-light spectrum to produce this eerie, otherworldly picture. Here's what Carolyn Porco, leader of the Cassini imaging team at the Colorado-based Space Science Institute, says about the image in today's "Captain's Log":

"Of all the many glorious images we have received from Saturn, none are more strikingly unusual than those we have taken from Saturn's shadow. They unveil a rare splendor seldom seen anywhere else in our solar system.

"This one is our special gift to you, the people of the world, in this holiday season that brings to a close the year 2012. We fervently hope it serves as a reminder that we humans, though troubled and warlike, are also the dreamers, thinkers, and explorers inhabiting one achingly beautiful planet, yearning for the sublime, and capable of the magnificent. We hope it reminds you to protect our planet with all your might and cherish the life it so naturally sustains.

"From all of us on Cassini, the happiest of holidays to everyone."

The Hubble Space Telescope's science team is also rolling out the holiday goodies, with a twisty planetary nebula known as NGC 5189 serving as the centerpiece. "The intricate structure of this bright gaseous nebula resembles a glass-blown holiday ornament with a glowing ribbon entwined," the Hubble team says in today's photo advisory.

NASA / ESA / Hubble Heritage

A holiday image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows the planetary nebula NGC 5189. The image was captured by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 on Oct. 8.

Planetary nebulae like NGC 5189 are formed when a medium-sized star like our sun enters the last stages of its life, and puffs away its outer shells of glowing gas. This nebula's swirly structure is thought to be due to the influence of an unseen companion star that's stirring the pot, gravitationally speaking.

The picture was taken by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3, one of the instruments that was installed during the telescope's final servicing mission in 2009. The camera's filters were tuned to the specific wavelengths of fluorescing sulfur, hydrogen and oxygen atoms, plus broad filters in visible and near-infrared wavelengths to capture the star colors.

The National Optical Astronomy Observatory and WIYN Consortium are also putting out a glittery end-of-the-year picture of the Cygnus Loop, a giant supernova remnant that glows 1,500 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. The observations were made in 2003 by astronomer Richard Cool, using the NOAO Mosaic 1 camera on the WIYN 0.9-meter telescope on Kitt Peak, Ariz.

The Cygnus Loop shines in a picture released by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory and the WIYN Consortium.

Back then, the computing power wasn't sufficient to process the picture's 600 million pixels into a single, full-resolution color image. Now the telescope observations have been re-reduced and reprocessed by Travis Rector at the University of Alaska at Anchorage to produce the version released today. "Images like this are amazing, because they can remind you of the big picture and beauty that surrounds us," Cool said in NOAO's image advisory.

These pictures are cool enough for Christmas cards, but if you need a little inspiration for your last-minute mailing list, the teams behind NASA's Great Observatories can help: The Space Telescope Science Institute's Hubble Web site offers printable holiday cards. The team behind the Chandra X-Ray Observatory has e-cards suitable for a variety of occasions. You can turn to Zazzle or CafePress to order greeting cards featuring imagery from the Spitzer Space Telescope.

The European Space Agency, meanwhile is offering a selection of space-themed e-cards as well as a printable 2013 Hubble calendar.

More holiday treats:

• 2012 Cosmic Log Space Advent Calendar
• Stocking stuffers for stargazers
• The Atlantic: 2012 Hubble Advent Calendar
• 2012 Zooniverse Advent Calendar

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

The team behind the Hubble Space Telescope has transformed our view of the universe through iconic images such as the Pillars of Creation and the Cat's Eye, but even the professionals can miss some gems — as demonstrated by today's winners of the "Hubble's Hidden Treasures" contest.

The contest, which had its kickoff in March, invited members of the public to sort through more than 700,000 archived images from the space telescope and come up with pictures that have never before been put in the spotlight. The results illustrate how today's software is making it easier for amateur astronomers to do professional-level work.

The Hidden Treasures contest is sponsored by the folks at the European Space Agency's Hubble headquarters in Garching, Germany. Nearly 3,000 photo submissions were received, in two categories. One category was reserved for folks who used color compositing and other image-processing techniques to bring out the best in the Hubble imagery. The other was for folks who spotted great pictures in the archive, but didn't fully process the images themselves.

Ten winners were selected in each category and will receive prizes ranging from Hubble posters to Apple gadgets and autographs from "Hubble-hugging" astronaut John Grunsfeld.

Double-winner
The top winner in the image-processing category, as well as the "People's Choice" competition, is Josh Lake, a 34-year-old physics and astronomy teacher (and volleyball coach) at Pomfret School in Connecticut. Lake told me he was "really surprised and happy" to learn that he was a winner.

"We have our own observatory here, so I've been teaching students to do processing for the past five years or so," he said.

The fact that he won the People's Choice online contest might not have been so surprising, considering that he could enlist students and alumni, family and friends to vote for his picture of the star-forming region NGC 1763. "I was totally blown away to find out that I had won the jury prize, too" Lake said.

Lake said that image processing is "something that I love doing," but it sounds as if he won't be giving up his teaching job for a career in astronomical image processing anytime soon. "I think I would really miss the students and this community," he said. "It'd be a tough lifestyle to break out of, and just go to a 9-to-5 job sitting in front of a computer. ... The work here is hard, but it's life-changing."

Here's hoping that Lake's image-building feat will be life-changing as well. To get a sense of how he did it, check out this three-minute time-lapse video of the process, and then feast your eyes on the finished product:

NASA / ESA / Josh Lake

Josh Lake submitted a stunning image of NGC 1763, part of the N11 star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud. ESA/Hubble had previously published an image of an area just adjacent to this, based on observations by the same team. Josh took a different approach, producing a bold two-color image that contrasts the light from glowing hydrogen and nitrogen. The image is not in natural colors — hydrogen and nitrogen produce almost indistinguishable shades of red light that our eyes would struggle to tell apart — but Josh's processing separates them out into blue and red, dramatically highlighting the structure of the region. As well as narrowly topping the jury's vote, Josh Lake also won the public vote.

Here are a few more of the contest winners, with comments from the European Hubble team. For links to all 20 images, check out the European Hubble site's "Hidden Treasures" announcement.

NASA / ESA / Andre van der Hoeven

Andre van der Hoeven of the Netherlands came a close second in the jury vote. His image of the spiral galaxy Messier 77 is highly attractive, and is also an impressive piece of image processing, combining a number of datasets from separate instruments into one amazing picture.

NASA / ESA / Judy Schmidt

Judy Schmidt of the United States entered several highly accomplished images into the competition. Her picture of XZ Tauri, a newborn star spraying out gas into its surroundings and lighting up a nearby cloud of dust, was the jury's favorite - and won third place in the image-processing contest. This was a challenging dataset to process, as Hubble only captured two colors in this area. Nevertheless, the end result is an attractive image, and an unusual object that we would never have found without her help

NASA / ESA / Brian Campbell

Brian Campbell's picture of NGC 6300 won first prize in the basic image-searching category.

NASA / ESA / Budeanu Cosmin Mirel

Budeanu Cosmin Mirel won the public vote in the basic image-searching category with a picture of NGC 4100.

More winners in astrophotography:

• 'World at Night' finds beauty in darkness and light
• All-time top 10 from Astronomy Picture of the Day
• The Year in Space Pictures: 2011

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

H. Olofsson / ESA / NASA

The bright star U Camelopardalis, or U Cam for short, is surrounded by a tenuous shell of gas in an image from the Hubble Space Telescope.

The flash of an earthly fireworks display can be over in an instant — sometimes literally — but the show is longer lasting in outer space. The dying red-giant star known as U Camelopardalis, 1,500 light-years away in a region of sky near the north celestial pole, is in the midst of a fireworks blast that lasts for centuries.

By human standards, U Cam's blast may seem like an eternity. The star's shining shell of glowing gas, documented in this picture from the Hubble Space Telescope, has been traveling outward for something like 700 years, as Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait points out. When the outward explosion began, Europe was suffering through famines and plagues, and the mainstream view was that our planet was the center of the universe.

But in the astronomical scheme of things, centuries are mere blinks of the eye — and it won't be long before U Cam gives up the ghost.

U Cam is a carbon-rich star that's running low on its fusion fuel and becoming unstable. Every few thousand years, it coughs away stellar material as a thin, faintly glowing shell. The star itself is actually much smaller than it looks. The brightness dial has been turned way up to emphasize the delicate structure of the shell, and that means U Cam's glare is turned up as well.

Plait notes that our own sun is destined to run low on fuel billions of years from now, turn into a red giant and start blasting away shells of material — just as U Cam is doing now. "What we're seeing here is a glimpse of our own future," he writes. That's certainly a sobering thought, but 7 billion years or so should give us plenty of time to look around for other places where we can hang out.

NASA / JPL-Caltech

The Flame Nebula flares in this color-coded view from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. The famous Horsehead Nebula can be seenas a small bump poking out from the edge of the cloud, below the bright star of the flame.

Who knows? One of those places might be in the neighborhood of the Flame Nebula. The star-forming nebula is situated about as far away from us as U Cam — but in the direction of the constellation Orion, near the celestial equator. NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer captured this view of the vast cloud and dust, lit up by a bright star that's 20 times as massive as our sun.

This view also shows two other familiar nebulae. The knot of light just beneath the brightest part of the image is a nebula known as NGC 2023. The Horsehead Nebula is poking out from the greenish-colored cloud, just to the right of NGC 2023 and down a bit. In visible light, the Horsehead is a dark cloud silhouetted by glowing gas, but in infrared light, we see the glow of the cloud instead.

This image is color-coded to reflect different infrared wavelengths. Hot stars are seen in shades of blue and bluish green, while relatively cool objects, such as the dust of the nebulae, show up in shades of green and red. The color combination makes for a fireworks display well-suited for the week of the Fourth of July.

Where in the Cosmos
The picture of the Flame Nebula served as this week's puzzle picture for the "Where in the Cosmos" contest on the Cosmic Log Facebook page. It only took a few minutes for Matt Gunn to identify the picture as the Flame Nebula, and Michael Vacirca and David Frambo were right behind him. All three are eligible to receive 3-D glasses, wrapped up in a 3-D picture of yours truly.

To put those red-blue glasses to use, check out Cosmic Log's 3-D archive, as well as the 3-D images available through the Planetary Society blog. And to get in position for next week's "Where in the Cosmos" contest, be sure to hit the "like" button for the Cosmic Log Facebook page.

Weekly Space Hangout
Cosmic sights were among the topics addressed during this week's Space Hangout, orchestrated by Universe Today's Fraser Cain, but we also addressed developments closer to home, such as the discovery of a new boson at the Large Hadron Collider and the untimely death of former astronaut Alan Poindexter. Check out the YouTube video for the whole Hangout.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Thierry Legault / Astrophoto.fr

French astrophotographer Thierry Legault captured this view of the Hubble Space Telescope passing over the sun's disk during this week's transit of Venus. The circles highlight the Hubble on multiple exposures taken every tenth of a second during the telescope's 0.9-second transit.

Over the past few days, we've seen lots of amazing photos showing Venus' last-in-a-lifetime crossing of the sun, but this shot of the Hubble Space Telescope zooming past Venus may be the only picture of its kind.

It's actually a combination of photographs, snapped every tenth of a second by master astrophotographer Thierry Legault. Nine speck-sized images of Hubble are highlighted with circles in the image. Legault, who is famed for his pictures of spacecraft transits across the sun, traveled from his home base in France to northern Australia for the shot.

After conducting the calculations with CalSky software, Legault made sure he was in Queensland at 01:42:25 UTC June 6, pointing his Takahashi FSQ-106ED telescope at the sun with the proper filters attached. "Thanks to the continuous shooting mode of the Nikon D4 DSLR running at 10 fps [frames per second], nine images of the HST were recorded during its 0.9s transit (1/8000s, 100 iso, raw mode). Turbulence was moderate to high," Legault reported on his website.

You read that right: While it took Venus more than six hours to inch its way in front of the solar disk, the Hubble Space Telescope zipped across in just nine-tenths of a second. Imagine how disappointing it would have been to have a cloud in the way at that moment!

Legault is promising more pictures of Venus, taken during the transit and afterward. But it'll be hard to match this one. The next transit of Venus won't occur until the year 2117, and even though Hubble has long outlasted its projected lifetime, the space telescope will surely be sent down to its fiery doom by then. So chances are this is the only picture that will ever be taken of Hubble and Venus simultaneously silhouetted by the sun.

By the way, Hubble was conducting its own transit tasks during Venus' crossing. Hubble focused on the moon and analyzed  the reflected sunlight to find out how easy it will be for future telescopes to pick out the spectral signature of Earthlike planets passing over alien suns. Stay tuned for more about the results of that experiment.

Where in the Cosmos
This picture served as today's photo puzzle for our "Where in the Cosmos" contest, open to Cosmic Log Facebook followers. It took just a couple of minutes for Ollie Nanyes to tell me what those little specks represented. For being so quick on the draw, I'm sending Nanyes a pair of 3-D glasses donated by Microsoft Research's WorldWide Telescope project. Kent Avery, the runner-up in the guessing game, is getting 3-D specs as well. (Microsoft is a partner along with NBC Universal in the msnbc.com joint venture.)

The cardboard-and-cellophane glasses I'm sending Nanyes and Avery will be wrapped up in a 3-D picture of yours truly, but there are other, more interesting 3-D space pictures online. This Cosmic Log 3-D archive points you to some stunners. Click the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page, and you too may be eligible for some 3-D glasses goodness in the weeks to come. Just for fun, go full-screen on this simulated 3-D view of the transit from the National Solar Observatory Integrated Synoptic Program:

More wonders from Thierry Legault:

• Falling satellite seen from Earth
• Last looks at the shuttle in orbit
• Spaceships get their day in the sun
• Sun gets double-crossed
• Still more from Legault's website

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.