Splashed with vivid colors resembling abstract art pieces, four infrared snapshots from the WISE telescope show a streaking comet, the heart of a stellar nursery, and galaxies in the distant universe.

Comet Siding Spring is the subject of this image from WISE. The comet was heading toward the outer solar system in its orbit as WISE took this picture on Jan. 10, 2010. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

NASA released the images Wednesday, one month after the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer started scanning the cosmos to detect countless new galaxies, stars, asteroids and comets.

"WISE has worked superbly," said Ed Weiler, associate administrator for NASA's science mission directorate. "These first images are proving the spacecraft's secondary mission of helping to track asteroids, comets and other stellar objects will be just as critically important as its primary mission of surveying the entire sky in infrared."

The telescope snapped an image of comet Siding Spring with a trailing stream of dust 10 million miles long glowing red in infrared light.

Scientists believe WISE will discover dozens of previously unseen comets and up to 100,000 new asteroids, including bodies that bear watching because they occasionally swing close to Earth.

WISE has already taken more than 250,000 pictures since Jan. 14, and the telescope will continue capturing a new image every 11 seconds through at least October.

Images released Wednesday also show WISE's view inside a star-forming region some 20,000 light years away, a wide-angle shot of the Andromeda galaxy, and a picture of the Fornax galaxy cluster 60 million light years from Earth.

WISE collected this image of Andromeda, the closest large galaxy to the Milky Way, located about 2.5 million light years away. This mosaic covers the equivalent area of 100 full moons, or about a five-degree swath of the sky. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

"All these pictures tell a story about our dusty origins and destiny," said Peter Eisenhardt, the WISE project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "WISE sees dusty comets and rocky asteroids tracing the formation and evolution of our solar system. We can map thousands of forming and dying solar systems across our entire galaxy. We can see patterns of star formation across other galaxies, and waves of star-bursting galaxies in clusters millions of light years away."

The picture are examples of regions and objects researchers hope to discover and study through WISE.

"We've got a candy store of images coming down from space," said Ned Wright, WISE principal investigator at UCLA. "Everyone has their favorite flavors, and we've got them all."

The observatory's reservoir of chilled solid hydrogen will be exhausted by October, effectively ending WISE's primary mission. The detectors of the 16-inch telescope are cooled by hydrogen to permit the instrument to observe some of the coldest objects of the universe with temperatures as low as -330 degrees Fahrenheit.

Scientists expect WISE will survey the entire sky one-and-a-half times by the time hydrogen runs out.