Hubble ready for launch, 1990

Hubble is lifted into the upright position at Kennedy Space Center in preparation for its 1990 launch aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery. The telescope was designed and built in the 1970s and 1980s, but its launch was delayed by the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986. A close look at this image reveals a portion of the 225 feet (68.6 m) of handrails installed around the outside for astronauts to grip during repair mission spacewalks.

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IMAGE CREDIT: NASA

Monitoring the Hubble from Baltimore, MD

Hubble is monitored constantly by four teams, each made up of a quartet of flight controllers. The flight controllers deal with operations ranging from pointing the telescope to receiving data.

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IMAGE CREDIT: NASA

First servicing mission, 1993

Astronauts remove the Wide Field and Planetary Camera to replace it with its more powerful successor, Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, during Hubble’s first servicing mission in 1993. The camera, shaped something like a grand piano, weighs 610 pounds (277 kg) on Earth, but nothing in space. It can detect stars a billion times fainter than the ones we can see with our eyes. Most of Hubble’s most popular pictures have been taken with this second camera.

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IMAGE CREDIT: NASA

Clean room at Ball Aerospace, 1996

Engineers in a clean room at Ball Aerospace in Boulder, Colo., work on one of Hubble’s instruments, the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS), in 1996. The instrument, installed in Hubble in 1997, breaks light into colors, giving scientists an important analytical tool for studying the cosmos. STIS has been used to study such objects as black holes, new stars, and massive planets forming outside our solar system.

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IMAGE CREDIT: NASA

Second servicing mission, 1997

Astronaut Steve Smith works on Hubble during the second servicing mission in 1997 with a ratchet. NASA specially designed the power tool to withstand the harsh environment of space, making it an essential item during three different Hubble missions. Hubble was specifically built to be serviced in orbit with replaceable parts and instruments. Astronauts performed four days of spacewalks during the second servicing mission to replace instruments and repair the telescope.

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IMAGE CREDIT: NASA

Goddard clean room

Carriers, used to transport Hubble instruments, wait in the largest clean room in the world, Goddard Space Flight Center’s 1.3-million-cubic-foot (0.036 million cubic meters) High Bay Clean Room. Clean rooms are pristine areas kept as free as possible of contaminants that could interfere with delicate technology. The platform used to anchor Hubble to the space shuttle during repair missions is kept here. Astronauts also train in the room for servicing missions.

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IMAGE CREDIT: NASA

X-Structure at core of Whirlpool Galaxy

This image of the core of the nearby spiral galaxy M51, taken with the Wide Field Planetary camera (in PC mode) on NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, shows a striking, dark “X” silhouetted across the galaxy’s nucleus. The “X” is due to absorption by dust and marks the exact position of a black hole which may have a mass equivalent to one-million stars like the sun. The darkest bar may be an edge-on dust ring which is 100 light-years in diameter.

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Credit: H. Ford (JHU/STScI), the Faint Object Spectrograph IDT, and NASA

Spiral Galaxy M100

An image of the grand design of spiral galaxy M100 obtained with the second generation Wide Field and Planetary Camera (WFPC-2).

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Credit: NASA, STScI

Cat's Eye Nebula

This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image shows one of the most complex planetary nebulae ever seen, NGC 6543, nicknamed the “Cat’s Eye Nebula.” Hubble reveals surprisingly intricate structures including concentric gas shells, jets of high-speed gas and unusual shock-induced knots of gas. Estimated to be 1,000 years old, the nebula is a visual “fossil record” of the dynamics and late evolution of a dying star.

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Credit: J.P. Harrington and K.J. Borkowski (University of Maryland), and NASA

Venus cloud tops

This is a NASA Hubble Space Telescope ultraviolet-light image of the planet Venus, taken on January 24 1995, when Venus was at a distance of 70.6 million miles (113.6 million kilometers) from Earth.

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Venus is covered with clouds made of sulfuric acid, rather than the water-vapor clouds found on Earth. These clouds permanently shroud Venus’ volcanic surface, which has been radar mapped by spacecraft and from Earth-based telescope.

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Credit: L. Esposito (University of Colorado, Boulder), and NASA

Ring around suspected black hole

The gravitational pull of a suspected super-massive black hole forms a frisbee-like disk of cool gas, at the core of an energetic galaxy. Subsequent Hubble observations of yet another active galaxy (M87) confirmed the reality of monstrous black holes — gravitational “sink holes” that trap everything, even light.

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Credit: L. Ferrarese (Johns Hopkins University) and NASA

Supernova 1994D in Galaxy NGC 4526

The Hubble Space Telescope Key Project team used the Hubble telescope to observe 18 galaxies out to 65 million light-years. They discovered almost 800 Cepheid variable stars, a special class of pulsating star used for accurate distance measurement. Although Cepheids are rare, they provide a very reliable “standard candle” for estimating intergalactic distances. The team used the stars to calibrate many different methods for measuring distances.

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Credit: NASA, ESA, The Hubble Key Project Team, and The High-Z Supernova Search Team

Bubble Nebula

The remarkably spherical “Bubble” marks the boundary between an intense wind of particles from the star and the more quiescent interior of the nebula. The central star of the nebula is 40 times more massive than the Sun and is responsible for a stellar wind moving at 2,000 kilometers per second (4 million miles per hour or 7 million kilometers per hour) which propels particles off the surface of the star. The bubble surface actually marks the leading edge of this wind’s gust front, which is slowing as it plows into the denser surrounding material. The surface of the bubble is not uniform because as the shell expands outward it encounters regions of the cold gas, which are of different density and therefore arrest the expansion by differing amounts, resulting in the rippled appearance. It is this gradient of background material that the wind is encountering that places the central star off center in the bubble.

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Credit: NASA, Donald Walter (South Carolina State University), Paul Scowen and Brian Moore (Arizona State University)

Springtime on Neptune

Neptune, the eighth planet from the Sun, is known for its weird and violent weather. It has massive storm systems and ferocious winds that sometimes gust to 900 miles per hour, but the new Hubble observations are the first to suggest that the planet undergoes a change of seasons.

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Observations of Neptune made over six years by a group of scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) show a distinct increase in the amount and brightness of the banded cloud features located mostly in the planet’s southern hemisphere.

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Credit: NASA, L. Sromovsky, and P. Fry (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Sombrero galaxy

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has trained its razor-sharp eye on one of the universe’s most stately and photogenic galaxies, the Sombrero galaxy, Messier 104 (M104). The galaxy’s hallmark is a brilliant white, bulbous core encircled by the thick dust lanes comprising the spiral structure of the galaxy. As seen from Earth, the galaxy is tilted nearly edge-on. We view it from just six degrees north of its equatorial plane. This brilliant galaxy was named the Sombrero because of its resemblance to the broad rim and high-topped Mexican hat.

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Credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Oddball galaxies in deep space

Called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF), the million-second-long exposure reveals the first galaxies to emerge from the so-called “dark ages,” the time shortly after the big bang when the first stars reheated the cold, dark universe.

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Credit: NASA, ESA, S. Beckwith (STScI) and the HUDF Team

Dying star

The star in the center of the Red Rectangle is one that began its life as a star similar to our Sun. It is now nearing the end of its lifetime, and is in the process of ejecting its outer layers to produce the visible nebula. The shedding of the outer layers began about 14,000 years ago. In a few thousand years, the star will have become smaller and hotter, and will begin to release a flood of ultraviolet light into the surrounding nebula; at that time, gas in the nebula will begin to fluoresce, producing what astronomers call a planetary nebula.

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Credit: NASA; ESA; Hans Van Winckel (Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium); and Martin Cohen (University of California, Berkeley)

Light echoes after stellar outburst

The Hubble Space Telescope’s latest image of the star V838 Monocerotis (V838 Mon) reveals dramatic changes in the illumination of surrounding dusty cloud structures. The effect, called a light echo, has been unveiling never-before-seen dust patterns ever since the star suddenly brightened for several weeks in early 2002.

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Credit: NASA, ESA and H.E. Bond (STScI)

Hubble Image Overlaid on Modeling of Apollo 17 Landing Site

This image was constructed by overlaying the Hubble Advanced Camera for Surveys image of the Apollo 17 landing region within the Taurus-Littrow valley, taken on Dec. 16, 2005, with a digital-terrain model acquired by the Apollo program to provide a perspective view looking from west to east up the valley.

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Credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Garvin (NASA/GSFC)

Close-up view of the Aristarchus crater

The Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys snapped this close-up view of the Aristarchus crater on Aug. 21, 2005. The crater is 26 miles (42 kilometers) in diameter and approximately 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) in depth, and sits at the southeastern edge of the Aristarchus Plateau. Aristarchus is one of the youngest and largest craters on the Moon. The crater formed between 100 and 900 million years ago.

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Credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Garvin (NASA/GSFC)

Crab Nebula

This composite image of the Crab Nebula uses data from three of NASA’s Great Observatories. The Chandra X-ray image is shown in light blue, the Hubble Space Telescope optical images are in green and dark blue, and the Spitzer Space Telescope’s infrared image is in red. The size of the X-ray image is smaller than the others because the outwardly streaming higher-energy electrons emitting X-ray light radiate away their energy more quickly than the lower-energy electrons emitting optical and infrared light. The neutron star, which has the mass equivalent to the sun crammed into a rapidly spinning ball of neutrons twelve miles across, is the bright white dot in the center of the image.

Pluto with moons Charon, Nix, and Hydra

Photographed by Hubble in 2005, Nix and Hydra are roughly 5,000 times fainter than Pluto and are about two to three times farther from Pluto than its large moon, Charon, which was discovered in 1978.

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Credit: NASA, ESA, H. Weaver (JHU/APL), A. Stern (SwRI), and the HST Pluto Companion Search Team

String of cosmic "pearls" around exploding star

Two decades ago, astronomers spotted one of the brightest exploding stars in more than 400 years.nnSince that first sighting, the doomed star, called Supernova 1987A, has continued to fascinate astronomers with its spectacular light show. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is one of many observatories that has been monitoring the blast’s aftermath.nnThis image shows the entire region around the supernova. The most prominent feature in the image is a ring with dozens of bright spots. A shock wave of material unleashed by the stellar blast is slamming into regions along the ring’s inner regions, heating them up, and causing them to glow. The ring, about a light-year across, was probably shed by the star about 20,000 years before it exploded.

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Credit: NASA, ESA, P. Challis and R. Kirshner (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)

Galaxy silhouettes

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has captured a rare alignment between two spiral galaxies. The outer rim of a small, foreground galaxy is silhouetted in front of a larger background galaxy. Skeletal tentacles of dust can be seen extending beyond the small galaxy’s disk of starlight.

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Credit: NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)