Celebrate Hubble's 26th birthday with 26 of the telescope's most breathtaking photos
This year's birthday image is of a 'Bubble Nebula' between 7,000 and 11,000 light-years away. It formed because the solar wind of a nearby star crashes into a massive molecular cloud full of dust and gas, causing it to glow.
Westerlund 2, a giant cluster of about 3,000 stars that is 20,000 light-years away, was the 25th anniversary image.
Birthday photo #24: This colorful plume of gas and bright stars known as the Monkey Head Nebula in the Orion constellation, which is 6,400 light-years away.
For Hubble's 23rd birthday, the team released this photo of the Horsehead Nebula in the Orion constellation taken via infrared imaging, which is why it looks so ethereal.
This incredibly colorful image is of the Tarantula Nebula — so named because its glowing filaments resemble spider legs — celebrated Hubble's 22nd anniversary.
This "rose," released for Hubble's 21st, is two galaxies interacting with each other. The bigger galaxy has a mass about five times larger than the smaller galaxy, so it's pulling the little one into a spiral shape.
This incredible image celebrated two decades in the sky for the telescope. It's of pillars of gas where stars are born, called the Carina Nebula.
The 19th anniversary team called this image the "Fountain of Youth," a cluster of galaxies where stars, gas, and dust shoot up in a stream that stretches over 100,000 light-years.
For Hubble's 18th birthday, the team released not one but 59 images of colliding galaxies. Here are 12 of them.
At the time, this 17th anniversary photo was one of the largest panoramic images ever taken. It captures a 50 light-year-wide swath of Carina Nebula, where stars are being born and dying.
The Hubble team celebrated the telescope's sweet 16 with this image of Messier 82, a starburst galaxy where stars are being born 10 times faster than in the Milky Way.
For its 15th birthday, the Hubble team again released several images. One of the most striking was this tower of gas and dust rising from the Eagle Nebula. The plume is 9.5 light-years long.
This ringed galaxy photo commemorated Hubble's 14th birthday. The galaxy is 300 million light-years away, and the ring alone is 150,000 light-years across — making it 50% wider than our own Milky Way galaxy.
The gorgeous Swan Nebula, located about 5,500 light-years away in the Sagittarius constellation, celebrated Hubble's 13th anniversary. Stars being born may be the most beautiful site in the universe.
The team didn't celebrate Hubble's 12th birthday in 2002 with an image. But these photos (released that year) helped scientists estimate the age of the universe to more than 13 billion years old, based on how ancient these white dwarf stars were.
Source: NASA
This eerie image is of the Horsehead Nebula, which the Hubble team called "one of the most photographed objects in the sky," was shared on the telescope's 11th anniversary. It's a a cold, dark cloud of gas and dust in the middle of a glowing nebula.
Source: Hubble Site
This 10th anniversary image shows more stars being born in the Carina Nebula — Hubble's prettiest muse.
Hubble has also spent time imaging the planets of the solar system. In 1999, the telescope took these photos of Jupiter's moon Io, and the satellite's sulfur dioxide "snow" as it made a transit in front of the planet.
This wacky false-color image of Saturn celebrated Hubble's eighth year in the sky. The infrared camera that produced it helps scientists figure out what the planet's atmosphere and rings are made of.
This 1997 image was the sharpest view of Mars ever taken from Earth at the time. Hubble was refurbished again in 1997, making clearer images of the Red Planet possible.
Source: NASA
Hubble's sixth birthday was apparently the first one celebrated with its own image release. The photo shows multiple images of the same galaxy (seen in blue) that's been duplicated because of its intense gravitational field.
The team didn't release a specific fifth birthday image, but this was one of the most famous from 1995. Inside this hydrogen gas and dust, stars are born. The Hubble team called this image the "Pillars of Creation."
In 1994, Hubble captured this image of part of the Great Nebula in the Orion constellation, where stars are born. You can see the image is already sharper than previous years after astronauts first serviced the telescope in 1993.
Source: NASA
One of the main objectives of the telescope was to measure the Hubble Constant, the rate that Edwin Hubble calculated the universe is expanding at. In 1993, scientists starting getting their first hint with this set of images that measured how fast stars called Cepheids were traveling.
Source: Harvard
In 1992, Hubble took the first image of nebula NGC 2440, which contains one of the hottest known stars. It's the bright dot at the center of the image.
The team didn't officially celebrate Hubble's first birthday, but this was the first true-color photograph that the telescope took of Jupiter in 1991.
And finally, this was the first image Hubble ever took in space (on the right), what astronomers call "first light." Happy birthday, Hubble!
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