This is way cooler than those chocolate filled advent calendars that you can buy at the grocery store (although arguably less yummy): The Big Picture over at The Boston Globe is doing an advent calendar to count down the days until Christmas, only instead of opening a little door to nuggets of chocolate each day, you get huge chunks of Hubble eye candy!

Each day until Christmas you can feast your eyes on a new image from the Hubble Space Telescope like today's shown above. Hubble has produced enough images over its lifetime to fill a few thousand advent calendars. If you happened to be worried about your waistline this holiday season, forget buying a calorie-bloated advent calendar and head on over to The Big Picture for the next 24 images, which are sure to be stunning.

Little cycling cap tip to The Bad Astronomer