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.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / UCLA

NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer produced this infrared view of the entire sky.

How would the sky look through infrared eyes? The scientists behind NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer mission have served up that kind of view with an all-sky map of infrared wavelengths, centered on the glowing Milky Way.

The map was unveiled this week to mark the completion of WISE's infrared sky atlas, more than two years after the $320 million mission was launched. The telescope collected more than 2.7 million images in four infrared wavelengths and sent down more than 15 trillion bytes of data. The WISE spacecraft was shut down a year ago, after surveying the entire sky one and a half times, but scientists needed still more time to analyze and organize the data.

The images were combined into an atlas of more than 18,000 images. The atlas is accompanied by a catalog listing the infrared properties of more than 560 million individual objects, ranging from near-Earth asteroids to far-flung galaxies. Wednesday's release of the catalog meets the fundamental objective of a mission that was conceived in 1998.

"Today, WISE delivers the fruit of 14 years of effort to the astronomical community," UCLA astronomer Edward Wright, the mission's principal investigator, said in a NASA news release.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / UCLA

This annotated version of the all-sky infrared map points out some of the main attractions. In addition, Saturn, Mars and Jupiter can be seen as stretched-out red spots far off the galactic plane, at roughly the 1 o'clock, 2 o'clock and 7 o'clock, respectively.

Over the past two years, WISE's science team has discovered the first examples of an ultra-cool class of stars known as Y-dwarfs, found the first Trojan asteroid to share Earth's orbit, and came up with a downsized estimate of the number of asteroids with a chance of threatening our planet. But the WISE team isn't done yet: Scientists will spend years poring over the data contained in the newly released catalog. And you can try your hand as well, although for most people, this gallery of WISE highlights should suffice.

Weekend goodies:

 WISE's all-sky image served as this week's "Where in the Cosmos" picture quiz on the Cosmic Log Facebook page, and it didn't take more than a few minutes for Eloid Ruiz to report what the picture showed. Eloid will be receiving a pair of 3-D glasses with my compliments (and an assist from Microsoft Research's World Wide Telescope project). Stay tuned next week for the next "Where in the Cosmos" puzzler — and while you're waiting, tune in the Weekly Space Hangout, a week-in-review webcast hosted by Universe Today's Fraser Cain.

More wonders from WISE:

• Space bubbles offer peek at sun's evolution
• Pacman Nebula bares its teeth
• A gathering of glorious galaxies
• Star goes through shocking transformation

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 or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

NASA

The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, shown in this artist's conception, made a survey of the entire sky in mid-infrared wavelengths.

Scientists laid out the results of an all-sky asteroid survey conducted by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. Sorry, no Planet X has been discovered yet ... which is good news, come to think of it. "Planet X is not coming to get us," said Amy Mainzer, principal investigator for the probe's NEOWISE mission.

The even better news is that there appear to be significantly fewer threatening near-Earth objects than previously thought. "We believe that the hazard to the earth may be somewhat less," Mainzer. an astronomer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, reported today during a news briefing at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

Mainzer and her colleagues shared all this good news after taking the most accurate census to date of the asteroids in Earth's orbital vicinity, within 120 million miles (195 kilometers) of the sun. Results from NEOWISE (which stands for Near-Earth Object WISE) are being published in The Astrophysical Journal, with Mainzer as lead author.

WISE was launched in 2009 to scan the full sky twice in infrared wavelengths, which provide a clearer picture of dark asteroids than visible-light observations — just as infrared-sensing goggles improve a soldier's night vision on Earth.

The space telescope observed more than 100,000 asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, plus at least 585 near Earth. That sampling was sufficient to produce an estimate of how many asteroids of various sizes exist in the target area — just as a population census provides a good demographic picture even though the census-takers didn't knock on every door.

NASA / JPL-Caltech

NEOWISE observations indicate there are at least 40 percent fewer near-Earth asteroids in total that are larger than 100 meters (330 feet). Our solar system's four inner planets are shown in green, with the sun in the center. Each red dot represents one asteroid. Object sizes are not to scale.

Mainzer said the WISE results confirmed that astronomers worldwide "have now found more than 90 percent" of the near-Earth asteroids that are wider than a kilometer (0.6 miles). That's the sort of space rock that scientists believe could create a mass-extinction event of the type that killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. The NEOWISE team's computer model suggests that there are 981 of such asteroids, compared with previous estimates of around 1,000. Astronomers currently have identified 911 of these "planet-buster" asteroids, none of which pose a threat to Earth over the next few centuries.

The 90 percent figure is important because Congress specified that figure in 1998 as the initial goal for NASA's Spaceguard program.

"The risk of a really large asteroid impacting the Earth before we could find and warn of it has been substantially reduced," Tim Spahr, the director of the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said in NASA's news release.

However ... there's another category of bad-news asteroids, ranging in size from 100 meters (330 feet) to a kilometer in width. These midsize rocks could wipe out a metropolitan area or create a "cosmic Katrina" if they were to hit in just the wrong place. The NEOWISE team estimated that there are 19,500 of such rocks in the near-Earth zone.

The good news is, that's a significantly smaller figure than previous estimates of 35,000 midsize near-Earth objects. The bad news is, astronomers are currently tracking 5,500 asteroids in that size range, which suggests that 14,000 or so remain to be detected. And there are an estimated million asteroids smaller than 100 meters capable of causing lesser amounts of damage if they were to blast through Earth's atmosphere.

In 2005, Congress revised the Spaceguard Survey's initial goal to call on NASA to find 90 percent of the near-Earth objects that are at least 140 meters (460 feet) wide, and Mainzer said tracking down all those rocks is "going to keep us busy for a long time."

"NEOWISE was just the latest asset NASA has used to find Earth's nearest neighbors," Lindley Johnson, program executive for the Near Earth Object Observation Program at NASA Headquarters, said in today's release. "The results complement ground-based observer efforts over the past 12 years. These observers continue to track these objects and find even more."

NASA / JPL-Caltech

This chart shows how data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, has led to revisions in the estimated population of near-Earth asteroids. Each of the rocks shown here represents 100 near-Earth asteroids detected in space.

During today's briefing, Johnson said the results of asteroid surveys would feed into NASA's plans to send astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid sometime in the mid-2020s. In fact, the asteroids that come closest to Earth and pose more of a potential threat would be of "particular interest for exploration destinations," he said.

As for Planet X, or Nibiru, or Nemesis ... Mainzer said there's not been any sign of a large object that could bring about a doomsday in 2012 or anytime soon. "We don't think that there's anything hazardous in the outer solar system," she said.

But that doesn't mean there's nothing interesting out there. Mainzer pointed out that the $320 million WISE mission has already detected 100 brown dwarfs in Earth's vicinity, including some of the coldest brown dwarfs ever seen. Although the WISE spacecraft was shut down earlier this year, the data analysis continues, and there's still a chance that other strange cosmic objects could come to light.

"We're still working on that now," Mainzer said.

More about asteroids:

• Hunt for new worlds goes into overdrive
• Interactive: The new solar system
• Asteroid early-warning system proposed
• Interactive: Close encounters of the asteroid kind

Last updated 5:42 p.m. ET.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.