The Red Bubble

A supernova explosion is a staggering event to imagine. At the core of an evolved star, runaway nuclear processes release a tremendous amount of energy in a fraction of a second. The mass of the star is blown apart at speeds of millions of miles per hour. A vast shock wave streams across interstellar space, followed by the blast... Continue Reading →

May the Fourth Be With You

May 4th is celebrated as Star Wars Day across the internet. We who do "serious science" have always enjoyed the fictional universes of books and films, but the crossover to our work has generally been tangential. But not always! In December 2015, our news team jumped on the bandwagon and released an image with the... Continue Reading →

Happy 29th Anniversary to Hubble!

Each year, we celebrate the April 24, 1990, launch of the Hubble Space Telescope with a special observation. This year, for the 29th Anniversary, we wanted to highlight the combination of imaging and spectroscopy that underlies the astronomical research results. The target chosen to illustrate these ideas is the Southern Crab Nebula. This symmetric gas... Continue Reading →

Celebrating Hubble’s 28th Anniversary

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 Kaleidoscopic Crab

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 →

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