Hubble Space Telescope

[Philidor]

Taken since its refurbishment in the billion dollar NASA repair mission earlier this year. Puts worrying about the washing up in perspective...





The Barred Spiral Galaxy NGC 6217. Image released by NASA on Wednesday, Sept. 9. NASA






This image shows the planetary nebula, catalogued as NGC 6302, but more popularly called the Bug Nebula or the Butterfly Nebula. The Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), a new camera aboard NASA's Hubble Space Telescope was installed by NASA astronauts in May 2009, during the servicing mission to upgrade and repair the 19-year-old Hubble telescope. NGC 6302 lies within our Milky Way galaxy, roughly 3,800 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius. The glowing gas is the star's outer layers, expelled over about 2,200 years. The "butterfly" stretches for more than two light-years, which is about half the distance from the Sun to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri. Image released by NASA on Wednesday, Sept. 9. NASA







A panoramic view of 100,000 stars residing in the core of Globular Star Cluster Omega Centauri. Image released by NASA on Wednesday, Sept. 9. NASA




http://hubblesite.org/

[marquis66]

The HST has been one of NASA's greatest successes, and not just because it makes pretty pictures that make people go "wow!", although I don't think that you can underscore how important that is for an American Space agency.

Without it, missions like the Kepler mission, scanning a star-rich region of space for Earth-like planets, wouldn't have been much, much more difficult.