The Lagoon Nebula We here at Hubble Image Central (a.k.a. the Office of Public Outreach at the Space Telescope Science Institute), along with the entire Hubble Space Telescope team, love to celebrate the anniversary of our favorite orbiting telescope's launch on April 24, 1990 by releasing a new picture. This year we're happy to present... Continue Reading →
The most common question we get asked about Hubble images is, "are the colors real?" What folks usually mean is, are these what the images would look like if we could travel in the Starship Enterprise to these cosmic landscapes? Or maybe more practically, if we could look through the Hubble Space Telescope. That would... Continue Reading →
Guest blogger Ray Villard, STScI News Director As the news director for STScI, I have Hubble pictures for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And, after 28 years of having a ringside seat to Hubble’s eagle-eye views, one is always tempted to think we’ve seen it all with this prolific space observatory. But that’s never the case... Continue Reading →
In 1998, a few years after the launch and the first mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, a number of astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute established the Hubble Heritage project. The main goal, among others, was to promote the visual qualities of Hubble images balanced with their science content. Over the years since, Heritage... Continue Reading →
This image, the M31 Deep Field, may not look like much. It doesn't have the bold colors and dynamic composition of many Hubble images. Yet it's one of my favorite images because of what we can see if we look a little harder. In fact it shows nothing less than the entire sweep of the... Continue Reading →
This image of the Crab Nebula from a recent Hubble press release packs a lot of information into a single picture. Five different wavelengths spanning nearly the entire breadth of the electromagnetic spectrum are present here. In this post, I'll deconstruct the image and look at how it was put together... but first, a little history... Continue Reading →
Illuminated Universe is a blog from the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) dedicated broadly to discussing visualization in astronomy but also focused on providing some background to images and videos. STScI is responsible for the science operations of the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope. Part of our mission is to inform... Continue Reading →
