BellaOnline Forums Education Astronomy Hubble Space Telescope - 27th birthday Aptil 2017

Westerlund 2 Nebula, painted in oil on canvas 24 x 36.
The artist Barbara Fee Sheehan (Naples, Florida, USA) was inspired by the Hubble Space Telescope image of this beautiful nebula.

Here's another painting by Barbara Sheehan. This is The Veil Nebula, oil on canvas 24 x 36 inches. A dynamic rendering of this amazing supernova remnant.

This is WR 31a, a star of the kind known as a Wolf-Rayet star. This one is about 30,000 light years away in the constellation Carina. The blue bubble is a Wolf-Rayet nebula, formed around 20,000 years ago and expanding at 220,000 kilometers per hour (137,000 mph). Such massive stars don't live very long in stellar terms, and they end their lives in a supernova explosion. The material in it will then be recycled to enrich new stars.

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

This image is called the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field. It combines Hubble observations taken over a decade of a small patch of sky in the constellation of Fornax. It's the deepest image of the Universe ever made. It covers only a tiny fraction of the sky, but the long exposure reveals about 5500 galaxies, some of them so distant that we see them when the Universe was less than 5% of its current age.

Credit: NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch (University of California, Santa Cruz), R. Bouwens (Leiden University), and the HUDF09 Team

Here is a collage of images taken of galaxy NGC 1512 taken by three Hubble Space Telescope cameras. Around the edge are images in one color or wavelength, going from near infrared through ultraviolet. In the middle the images have been combined into one picture to bring out detail in the ring of young star clusters that surrounds the core of the galaxy.
Credit: NASA, ESA, Dan Maoz (Tel-Aviv University, Israel, and Columbia University, USA)

This gorgeous picture shows MACS J0416.1-2403 – MACS J0416 to its friends. It's an astounding 4.3 billion light years away in the constellation Eridanus (the River). It's two galaxy clusters on the verge of collisioon. This happened long ago and far away, because the Solar System was newly formed when the light from MACS J0416 began its journey.

The Hubble Space Telescope wasn't the only one involved in getting this image. The galaxies and stars are by Hubble, but the diffuse blue shows the imprint of dark matter. The diffuse pink is radio emissions captured by the NRAO Jansky Very Large Array.

Getting data in several wavelengths of light gives astronomers a better understanding of what is going on.

The heavens are beautiful! Happy Easter!

Wow! It's stars, stars, stars! More than half a million of them. There are a few blue foreground stars, but this is a massive star cluster in the center of our Galaxy. Tucked away in the middle of it is a supermassive black hole with the mass of around four million Suns. The Galactic Center is 27,000 light years away in the constellation Sagittarius and it's a pretty crowded place.

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

If you want to see a fabulously elegant use of Hubble images, have a look at this dress made from a Hubble photo. Czech designer Jirina Tauchmanova made a collection of stunning dresses using Hubble images as the fabric. Just WOW!

Image credit: Varek, via Hubble Space Telescope.

An acrylic painting by Corina Chirila of "Alien Cave and Stars", inspired by Hubble.