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Hubble is Back!
posted: 11:39 am ET
26 January 2000
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hubble_nebula_000126In its first glimpse of the heavens since a December servicing mission, the Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of a planetary nebula -- not a planet at all, but the glowing remains of a dying, sun-like star. 
This stellar relic, first spied by William Herschel in 1787, is nicknamed the "Eskimo" Nebula (NGC 2392) because, when viewed through ground-based telescopes, it resembles a face surrounded by a fur parka. In this Hubble telescope image, the "fur parka" is really a disk of material embellished with a ring of comet-shaped objects, with their tails streaming away from the central, dying star. The Eskimo's "face" also contains some fascinating details. Although this bright central region resembles a ball of twine, it is, in reality, a bubble of material being blown into space by the central star's intense "wind" of high-speed material. "The clumps that form the comet heads all seem to be located at a similar distance from the star. This fact will be important in developing a theory of why the clumps formed in the first place," said planetary nebula expert J. Patrick Harrington of the University of Maryland in College Park. "Of all the planetary nebulae imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope, this new image is un-surpassed in subtle beauty."
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