Space butterfly

A COSMIC butterfly stretches its wings in a stunning new picture from the Hubble space telescope. But the delicate insect is really vast streams of gas racing at over 600,000mph from a dying star.

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The image tops several spectacular new snaps taken by the orbiting eye on the sky since it was repaired and upgraded in daring spacewalks by shuttle astronauts in May. Its new camera is ten times better - and its digital "film" was built by a British company, e2v Technologies of Chelmsford, Essex. Another dramatic new shot from Nasa's Hubble family album shows the Cat's Eye nebula - a cloud of gas heated to millions of degrees around another doomed star in the constellation of Draco, the dragon. Hubble also peered six million light-years beyond our own Milky Way to capture a galaxy of billions of stars in the Great Bear.