The Hubble Space Telescope outdid itself today with the release of the first pictures taken by a new camera mounted on the orbiting observatory in March. The images range from depicting sheer cosmic beauty, in classic Hubble style, to the surprise finding of thousands of distant and previously invisible galaxies.

David Leckrone, a senior Hubble project scientist at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center, called them remarkable and breathtaking.

"They're everything we expected and more," Leckrone said. "The only problem is doing them full justice as we try to show them to the public on 'old-fashioned' television, or in newspapers or magazines."

The pictures were taken primarily to test the new Advance Camera for Surveys (ACS), rather than to reveal any new science. Clearly, the device is working as planned.

"These are among the best images of the distant universe humans have ever seen," said Holland Ford, a Johns Hopkins University astronomer who for seven years led the development of the ACS, which makes pictures in optical and ultraviolet wavelengths.

Details of the new photographs:

A picture of the Tadpole galaxy is intriguing at face value, showing one galaxy stretched out through space by the gravitational interaction with another. But in the background was an important surprise. Roughly 6,000 galaxies were detected at various stages of evolution stretching back 13 billion years in time, nearly twice as many distant galaxies as detected earlier during the 1995 Hubble Deep Field project, the most comprehensive survey Hubble ever completed.

Importantly, the newly spotted galaxies were imaged in less than 10 percent of the time it took to generate the Deep Field survey. Astronomers said the galaxies represent almost the entire range of evolutionary stages for galaxies, dating back to early building blocks when smaller galaxies collided to create larger ones.

Arguably the most striking of the new pictures is a shot of the so-called Cone Nebula, reminiscent of the famous Pillars of Creation image produced by Hubble in 1995.

Another picture depicts the Omega Nebula, also called the Swan Nebula or M17. It shows a hotbed of star formation among billowing blankets of gas and dust.

Finally, Hubble's ACS imaged a collision between two spiral galaxies. Called the Mice, these galaxies may presage our future, astronomers say. In several billion years, our own Milky Way Galaxy is expected to collide with the Andromeda galaxy.

With the test pictures in hand, Hubble managers now fully expect the new camera to spot the most distant objects ever seen in visible and ultraviolet light.

The ACS, about the size of an old-fashioned phone booth, replaced Hubble's Faint Object Camera. Officials have said the ACS has twice the ability to resolve objects and a fourfold increase in sensitivity, potentially meaning a tenfold improvement in the ability to find faint stars and galaxies.

"We have achieved that tenfold increase, and more," Ford said.

All this power will be used to explore the most distant reaches of the cosmos, where intrinsically bright objects and phenomena have gone unexplored because they are simply too far away to be visible from Earth.

If all continues to go well, the camera will also spend some time on an improbable quest to take the first picture of a planet outside our solar system.

NICMOS almost ready

Separately, in a statement issued by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates Hubble for NASA, officials said Hubble's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) is finally coming back to life. It has been inoperative since 1998.

Along with a new crop of large, ground-based infrared telescopes, NICMOS is seen as an important tool for studying dust around young stars -- places where new planets might be forming.

During the March servicing mission, astronauts installed a new high-tech refrigerator to replace a cooling system that had malfunctioned. It has taken longer than hoped to get the camera operating again, but engineers now say gas inside the NICMOS cooling system had finally reached the target temperature of -333 degrees Fahrenheit (-203 degrees Centigrade).

NICMOS has been resuscitated and is being checked out. The first pictures are expected by early June.

At a press conference today, NASA and Hubble officials painted a rosy picture of the observatory's overall health. They had been worried that shutting off power for first time in 12 years during the servicing mission, and replacing parts that were not meant to be replaced, might lead to problems.

"Hubble is back in business and everything works great. Period," said Ed Weiler, Associate Administrator for Space Science at NASA Headquarters. He added that "the best is yet to come."

Next page: More detail on each of the new images