The online gallery is just a few months old, but the images offer incredible glimpses of space, Earth, and life aboard the International Space Station.

The stunning image NASA released on Friday was of the galaxy Messier 94, discovered in 1781 by Pierre Mechain and catalogued by Charles Messier. The galaxy is part of the constellation Canes Venatici, or Hunting Dogs, a small northern constellation about 16 million light years away. The galaxy is face-on, meaning that here on Earth, we can see its full spread (with a telescope, of course). It is about 30,000 light years across, much smaller than our own Milky Way galaxy, which is 100,000 light years in diameter. However, the Hubble telescope’s relatively limited field of view means that the image only captures about 7,000 light years across the center of the galaxy in this image.

In the middle of the image is the brightest point of Messier 94, called the galactic center. It is the point around which the galaxy rotates clockwise. The bright, cloudy ring around the galactic center is known as the starburst ring, an area where new stars are quickly forming.

The galaxy is of a peculiar shape, likely due to a pressure wave emanating from the galactic center. This wave compresses gas and dust into the outer region of the ring, causing the gas to collapse into the dark, dense clouds that can be seen at the outer region of the starburst ring. Inside these clouds, gravity begins to work, pulling the gas and dust together until the temperature and pressure are both high enough for stars to be born. On the very edge of the image are Messier 94’s newest, fully formed stars. They are blue, indicating that they are young, massive, and very hot, burning at up to 19,340 degrees Farhenheit.