Hubble telescope celebrates 30th birthday with stunning photo
On April 24, 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope was launched into space on the Space Shuttle Discovery and has been providing us with astonishing views of the cosmos ever since.
To celebrate its 30th birthday, the observatory produced a stunning portrait of a star-forming region close to our Milky Way Galaxy, about 163,000 light-years from earth. The image is nicknamed the “Cosmic Reef,” because the nebulas resemble an undersea world.
The giant red nebula in the photo is named NGC 2014, while it’s smaller blue neighbor is NGC 2020. Both are part of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.
In its 30 years of service the Hubble Space Telescope has made more than 1.4 million observations of nearly 47,000 celestial objects, with more than 900,000 observations taken with imaging instruments.
In its 30-year lifetime, the telescope has racked up more than 175,000 trips around our planet, totaling about 4.4 billion miles.
Astronomers using data from the telescope has produced more than 17,000 scientific papers, with more than 1,000 of those papers published in 2019.