Amazing Hubble Images

The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is a space telescope launched by NASA in 1990. After 20 years in orbit, it continues to produce amazing images of celestial bodies across the universe. This is a selection of it's incredible images.

Planetary Nebula NGC 6302
This object is an example of a planetary nebula, so-named because many of them have a round appearance resembling that of a planet when viewed through a small telescope.

Credit: NASA, ESA

Stephan's Quintet
Stephan’s Quintet, also known as Hickson Compact Group 92, was taken by the new Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) aboard NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.

Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team

NGC 6217
The galaxy lies 6 million light-years away in the north circumpolar constellation Ursa Major.

Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team

Jupiter and Ganymede
Composed of rock and ice, Ganymede is the largest moon in our solar system. It is even larger than the planet Mercury. But Ganymede looks like a dirty snowball next to Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. Jupiter is so big that only part of its Southern Hemisphere can be seen in this image.

Credit: NASA, ESA, and E. Karkoschka (University of Arizona)

Arp 147
Arp 147 appears in the Arp Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, compiled by Halton Arp in the 1960s and published in 1966. This picture was assembled from WFPC2 images taken with three separate filters.

Credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Livio (STScI)

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.

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

NGC 1275
One of the closest giant elliptical galaxies, NGC 1275 hosts a supermassive black hole. Energetic activity of gas swirling near the black hole blows bubbles of material into the surrounding galaxy cluster.

Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration

Interacting Galaxies
Galaxies have a dynamical side. They have close encounters that sometimes end in grand mergers and overflowing sites of new star birth as the colliding galaxies morph into wondrous new shapes.

Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Evans (University of Virginia, Charlottesville/NRAO/Stony Brook University), and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration

M74 Spiral Galaxy
This Hubble image of M74 is a composite of Advanced Camera for Surveys data taken in 2003 and 2005. The filters used to create the color image isolate light from blue, visible, and infrared portions of the spectrum, as well as emission from ionized hydrogen (known as HII regions).

Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration Acknowledgment: R. Chandar (University of Toledo) and J. Miller (University of Michigan)

Tarantula Nebula
The image reveals dramatic ridges and valleys of dust, serpent-head "pillars of creation," and gaseous filaments glowing fiercely under torrential ultraviolet radiation.

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

M87
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (HST) looks at a 4,000 light-year long jet of plasma emanating from the bright nucleus of the giant elliptical galaxy M87.

Credit: F. Duccio Macchetto/NASA/ESA

Great Nebula
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (HST) looks at the Great Nebula in Orion. One such jewel is this bow shock around the very young star, LL Ori.

Credit: NASA/Hubble Heritage Team

NGC 3079
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope snapshots reveal dramatic activities within the core of the galaxy NGC 3079, where a lumpy bubble of hot gas is rising from a cauldron of glowing matter.

Credit: NASA/Gerald Cecil (University of North Carolina), Sylvain Veilleux (University of Maryland), Joss Bland-Hawthorn (Anglo- Australian Observatory), and Alex Filippenko (University of California at Berkeley)

Barnard's Merope Nebula, IC 349
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has caught the eerie, wispy tendrils of a dark interstellar cloud being destroyed by the passage of one of the brightest stars in the Pleiades star cluster. Like a flashlight beam shining off the wall of a cave, the star is reflecting light off the surface of pitch black clouds of cold gas laced with dust. These are called reflection nebulae.

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

NGC 3324

This image reveals dramatic dark towers of cool gas and dust that rise above the glowing wall of gas. The dense gas at the top resists the blistering ultraviolet radiation from the central stars, and creates a tower that points in the direction of the energy flow. The high-energy radiation blazing out from the hot, young stars in NGC 3324 is sculpting the wall of the nebula by slowly eroding it away.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Hubble facts:

• The 20 years' worth of observations has produced more than 45 terabytes of data, enough information to fill nearly 5,800 DVDs.
• Each month the orbiting observatory generates more than 360 gigabytes of data, which could fill the storage space of an average home computer.
• Hubble is 13.3 meters (43.5 feet) long -- the length of a large school bus.
• In its 20-year lifetime the telescope has made more than 110,000 trips around our planet.

Source: NASA