The Hubble Space Telescope, vanguard of astrophotography, launched on this date 13 years ago. Things did not start well, but the observatory's track record has been nothing short of stellar since a 1993 mission corrected initially blurred vision.
To commemorate the birthday of the world's most well known observatory, astronomers today released yet another gorgeous Hubble photograph. The new image of a nebula called M17 shows swirls of gas illuminated by nearby, unseen stars.
The nebula is made mostly of hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, with small amounts of other elements, such as oxygen and sulfur.
M17 is also called the Swan, Omega or Horseshoe Nebula. Some call it the Checkmark or Lobster Nebula. The region of intense star birth, whatever its name, is located about 5,500 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius.
The wavy features are sculpted and lit by young, massive stars sitting just out of upper left of the picture. Ultraviolet radiation from the stars physically carves structures from the gas. It also heats the otherwise cold surfaces of the clouds, which then glow orange and red. Some material is shoved away by the stream of radiation, creating hot greenish regions.
The new image shows a portion of the nebula about 3 light-years wide. Though released today, the data behind the image was collected in 1999 with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. The colors in the image represent various gases. Sulfur is red; hydrogen is green; oxygen is blue.
Birthdays are a good time for remembering details that otherwise go unmentioned. So: The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA). The orbiting observatory is managed by the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. (AURA), all under a contract with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
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