'A purple nebula, in honor of Prince' tweets NASA

It appears there are some fans of the "Purple One" at NASA. The space agency tweeted this image out on Thursday with the caption, "A purple nebula, in honor of Prince, who passed away today," following the announcement that Prince Rogers Nelson, one of the most inventive and influential musicians of modern times, had died at the age of 57.

The image shows a composite view of the Crab nebula, "an iconic supernova remnant in our Milky Way galaxy," taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

"A wispy and filamentary cloud of gas and dust, the Crab nebula is the remnant of a supernova explosion that was observed by Chinese astronomers in the year 1054," reads a description of the Crab nebula on NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory website. Click here to read more about the image and see a high resolution photograph.