Pic of the Week: Happy Birthday Hubble!

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): The Hubble Space Telescope in low-Earth orbit. (NASA)

This year marks the 35th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope. It was launched on April 24, 1990 aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery. The telescope was expected to have a service life of 35 years, though it is still going strong with various proposals to update the telescope and keep it operating for years to come.

To mark the occasion, NASA put together a video highlighting missions and related images. The celebration will continue throughout the year with new images and other selected items.

Here are a few interesting facts related to the Hubble:

  • Hubble is currently located 326 miles (525 km) above Earth’s surface. If you could drive straight up, you could reach it in about the same time it would take you to drive from Baltimore, Maryland to Boston, Massachusetts. 
  • Hubble races through its orbit at about 17,000 miles per hour (27,000 kph), completing an orbit about every 95 minutes. That means it sees 15 sunrises every day.
  • While Hubble is speeding around Earth, it can lock onto a target without deviating more than 7/1000th of an arcsecond, or about the width of a human hair seen at a distance of one mile.
Image (Credit): Hubble 35th Anniversary Graphic. (NASA)

Pic of the Week: The Starburst Galaxy

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Starburst Galaxy Messier 94. (ESA/Hubble and NASA)

This week’s image is from the Hubble Space Telescope. It was shared on NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Week website last month. The sparkling galaxy, Messier 94, is about 15 million light-years away.

Here is NASA’s description of what you are seeing above:

Beautiful island universe Messier 94 lies a mere 15 million light-years distant in the northern constellation of the hunting dogs, Canes Venatici. A popular target for earth-based astronomers, the face-on spiral galaxy is about 30,000 light-years across, with spiral arms sweeping through the outskirts of its broad disk. But this Hubble Space Telescope field of view spans about 7,000 light-years or so across M94’s central region. The sharp close-up examines the galaxy’s compact, bright nucleus and prominent inner dust lanes, surrounded by a remarkable bluish ring of young, massive stars. The massive stars in the ring appear to be less than about 10 million years old, indicating the galaxy experienced a corresponding well-defined era of rapid star formation. As a result, while the small, bright nucleus is typical of the Seyfert class of active galaxies, M94 is also known as a starburst galaxy. Because M94 is relatively nearby, astronomers can explore in detail reasons for the galaxy’s burst of star formation.

Note: I swapped out the earlier protostar image for this one when I realized I was duplicating an earlier entry.

Pic of the Week: Swan Song for Stars

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): A planetary nebula named Kohoutek 4-55. (ESA/Hubble & NASA, K. Noll)

This image is from the ESA/Hubble Picture of the Week website. It shows a colorful planetary nebula called Kohoutek 4-55, which is about 4600 light-years away.

The ESA/Hubble website defines what you are seeing in this way:

A planetary nebula, a glowing shell of material thrown off by a star. A small central region of greenish clouds is encircled by a glowing, jagged ring, like a hole torn in fabric. A band of silvery-blue clouds outside this is again encircled by a larger, fainter yellow ring of gas. Puffy, smoky clouds of orange and red gas billow out from there into a large oval nebula, fading into the dark background of space.

Pic of the Week: Deep Field South

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): The Deep Field South captured by the ESA’s Euclid space telescope. (ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre, E. Bertin, G. Anselmi/Handout via REUTERS)

Last week, the European Space Agency released images from the Euclid space telescope, which was launched on July 1, 2023. The goal of the space telescope’s mission is to catalog more than 1.5 billion galaxies over a six year period.

The image above shows a part of the sky called the Deep Field South. One of the galaxy clusters near the center of the image is located almost 6 billion light-years away. At the center bottom of the image you can also clearly see a beautiful spiral galaxy.

Pic of the Week: Very Different Neighborhoods

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Hubble Space Telescope image of a sparkling spiral galaxy paired with a prominent star, both in the constellation Virgo. (ESA/Hubble & NASA, S. J. Smartt, C. Kilpatrick)

This week’s image is from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. It shows what appears to be two close neighbors – a star and a galaxy – but looks can be deceiving.

Here is more from NASA about this image:

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features a sparkling spiral galaxy paired with a prominent star, both in the constellation Virgo. While the galaxy and the star appear to be close to one another, even overlapping, they’re actually a great distance apart. The star, marked with four long diffraction spikes, is in our own galaxy. It’s just 7,109 light-years away from Earth. The galaxy, named NGC 4900, lies about 45 million light-years from Earth.

This image combines data from two of Hubble’s instruments: the Advanced Camera for Surveys, installed in 2002 and still in operation today, and the older Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, which was in use from 1993 to 2009. The data used here were taken more than 20 years apart for two different observing programs — a real testament to Hubble’s long scientific lifetime.