It’s been 35 years since Hubble came online, so in honor of the intrepid telescope’s 35th anniversary, we’ve put together this gallery of our favorite Hubble images.

The Hubble Space Telescope was originally expected to last about 15 years in orbit, before its optical surfaces became too pitted and degraded to return accurate images. But a checkup at 14 mission years revealed that the great telescope’s optical surfaces showed no meaningful degradation. *(Build it once, build it right...) *Since then, astronomers have sought to take advantage of every precious hour of this telescope’s life, living, as it is, on borrowed time.

Most of Hubble’s famous images were taken with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2), and the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). WFPC2 was the replacement installed on the first service mission. The WFPC2 was replaced with the WFC3 during the final Hubble service mission in 2009, and it has an even greater optical resolution. Some images were also taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), which replaced the original Faint Object Camera in 2002.

Note: Most of the images below are taken in the infrared and color-shifted into the visible band. Hubble can capture images in both the visible and near-infrared bands of the EM spectrum. When images are taken in the infrared, which is invisible to the human eye, the colors in the images highlight emission from several chemical elements. Oxygen emission is blue, sulfur is orange, and hydrogen and nitrogen are green.

Hubble Itself

We begin with a shot of Hubble itself, taken during its initial deployment from Discovery as part of STS-31 on April 25, 1990. The Space Shuttle carried a pair of IMAX cameras to capture footage from throughout the mission; this specific photo was taken from a Hasselblad camera. Hubble’s solar panels and antenna are visible and fully extended.

The Hubble Space Telescope (foreground) floats in orbit around Earth after a successful launch.

Credit: NASA

Hubble ‘Exploded View’

A wireframe model of what Hubble looks like on the inside. Scientists knew Hubble would frequently pass from the darkness of Earth’s shadow into full sunlight. Thermal stress modeling and proper component shielding were essential to Hubble’s long-term operation.

An exploded view of the Hubble Space Telescope, showing its instruments, solar panels, and antennas.

Credit: Julia W, Andrew Buck (Wikipedia)

At launch, Hubble carried five instruments: the Faint Object Camera, Faint Object Spectrograph, Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph, High Speed Photometer, and the Wide Field and Planetary Camera.

Hubble’s First Image

Hubble’s “near-sightedness” and the corrective lens that fixed it are a fairly well-known part of the observatory’s history, but the problem wasn’t immediately known to the general public, because the photos from Hubble were just so good. Hubble’s first light photo showed a dramatic improvement over the Las Campanas Observatory’s best image quality.

The first light photo taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. It compares ground-based observations from Las Campanas to the same area of sky as seen by the HST in May, 1990.

Credit: NASA

Mystic Mountain

This turbulent cosmic pinnacle lies within a tempestuous stellar nursery called the Carina Nebula, located 7,500 light-years away in the southern constellation of Carina. The image was released to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Hubble’s launch and deployment into orbit. The pillar of gas and dust in this image is more than 3 light-years long.

This craggy fantasy mountaintop enshrouded by wispy clouds looks like a bizarre landscape from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image, which is even more dramatic than fiction, captures the chaotic activity atop a pillar of gas and dust, three light-years tall, which is being eaten away by the brilliant light from nearby bright stars. The pillar is also being assaulted from within, as infant stars buried inside it fire off jets of gas that can be seen streaming from towering peaks.

Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Livio, Hubble 20th Anniversary Team (STScI)

The long streamers of gas shooting in opposite directions near the center of the image are known as HH 901 and HH 902. Activity like this indicates an active stellar nursery, as material is both flung away from the nascent stars and accreting to their surfaces.

Hubble’s First Deep Field

It’s easy to look at the stellar (pun thoroughly intended) array of images available to any astronomy aficionado today and feel a little let down by the original Hubble Deep Field. It’s grainy. It’s got a blank spot on one side. And if you’ve seen one nondescript smattering of stars, you’ve seen ’em all—right?

The first Hubble Deep Field, taken over the course of 10 consecutive days in December, 1995.

Credit: Robert Williams (NASA, ESA, STScI). Public Domain.

But the distant objects shining above mostly aren’t stars, they’re galaxies. The Deep Field is actually a tiny patch of the sky, roughly equivalent to a tennis ball seen from 100 meters away. The HDF showed a high percentage of disturbed and irregular galaxies, surprising astronomers and implying galactic collisions were much more common when the universe was smaller.

Hubble Gets Spectacles

Not long after Hubble debuted, scientists realized there was something off with its performance. It turned out that the outer edge of Hubble’s mirror was ground about 2.2 microns too flat, leaving the telescope with a permanent case of blurry vision.

Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski holds a “Before” and “After” photo showing the dramatic improvement in the Hubble Space Telescope’s image quality after a pair of corrective “spectacles” were fitted to the telescope.

Credit: NASA

Luckily, Hubble was designed for service calls and the mirror mistake proved fixable by way of a pair of “spectacles.” The astronauts of STS-61 flew the Endeavor to perform the first optometry appointment in low Earth orbit, installing a corrective optics assembly called COSTAR (Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement). The mission succeeded brilliantly. In this image, Maryland Senator and mission advocate Barbara Mikulski officially declared that “the trouble with Hubble is over” at a NASA press conference on Jan. 13, 1994. The images in her hands show the galaxy M100 before and after Hubble’s mirror fix.

Pillars of Creation

If there’s just one image on this page that you’ve seen before, it’s likely to be this one. The* Pillars of Creation* is one of the most iconic images the HST has ever captured. First photographed in 1995, the left-hand side of the image below is actually from 2014 when Hubble revisited the area following its last camera upgrade. The right-hand side shows the pillars as they appeared in 1995, shot with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2.

The Pillars of Creation as imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2014 (right), with a comparison against the original photo taken in 1995 (left).

Credit: NASA, ESA/Hubble, The Hubble Heritage Team

These enormous plumes of gas and dust are in the Eagle Nebula, within the Serpens constellation, some 6500 to 7000 light-years from Earth.

A Grazing Encounter Between 2 Spiral Galaxies

Looking in the direction of the constellation Canis Major, Hubble caught this near-collision between two spiral galaxies (NGC 2207 and IC 2163) with its Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. These two galaxies are entering a period of increased star formation as their dust clouds interact, but their fusion is in its early stages and could take as long as a billion years. Andromeda and the Milky Way may one day undergo a similar process.

Galaxy NGC 2207 and IC 2163 are shown on approach to one another. The smaller galaxy, IC 2163 (right), may already be stretching towards its larger neighbor.

Credit: NASA, ESA/Hubble, The Hubble Heritage Team

Butterfly Nebula

The Butterfly Nebula, AKA NGC 6302, is a planetary nebula in the direction of Scorpius. Despite the name, planetary nebulae have nothing to do with planets. To early astronomers, these often-colorful nebulae looked like distant planets. Hubble couldn’t even see the Butterfly Nebula until its last optics upgrade in 2009.

The Butterfly Nebula, NGC-6302, is a planetary nebula in the constellation Scorpius.

Credit: NASA, ESA, The Hubble SM4 ERO Team

Planetary nebulae are formed when giant stars expel enormous clouds of gas late in life.

Hubble Views a Merging Galactic Trio

What’s better than two colliding galaxies? Three colliding galaxies!

Three merging spiral galaxies against a black background. An unrelated foreground galaxy is to the left. The smudged, dim shapes of even more distant galaxies are visible in the background.

Credit: NASA

This trio of galaxies is known to astronomers as SDSSCGB 10189, because NASA presumably sorts through discarded motherboard branding for inspiration when it runs short of ideas. The gap between the galaxies is tiny, as these things go—a mere 50,000 light-years—and all three are expected to combine and form Galaxytron a behemoth on par with the largest, brightest galaxies ever found. Astronomers believe these brightest cluster galaxies, or BCGs, form when large and active galaxies merge, making SDSSCGB 10189 an interesting type example for an expected trend.

Horsehead Nebula

The Horsehead Nebula lies in the constellation Orion, south of Altinak (the easternmost star in Orion’s belt). It’s 1,375 light-years from Earth and is named after its supposed resemblance to a horse. Its dark color and opacity are caused by thick dust clouds that largely obscure the young stars forming within.

Detail of the Horsehead Nebula, as shot by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2013

Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI)

The Horsehead Nebula is backlit by the nebula IC 434 and part of the larger Orion molecular cloud complex. The image above was captured and released for Hubble’s 23rd anniversary in 2013, but here’s what it looked like when Hubble viewed it in 2001:

Detail of the Horsehead Nebula, as shot by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2001.

Credit: NASA, NOAO, ESA, The Hubble Heritage Team, STScI/AURA

The Mutara Orion Nebula

The Orion Nebula (Messier 42) is one of the most striking features in the constellation of Orion. The image here is a composite of visible and infrared light shot by Hubble in 2006. The combined mass of all its stars and gas is estimated at some two thousand solar masses, and it sits roughly 1,300 light-years from Earth.

First, find Alnitak, the leftmost star in Orion’s belt and the two stars that form its feet, Saiph (left) and Rigel (right). The bright, somewhat indistinct patch within that triangle is the Orion Nebula.

Credit: NASA

The Mayans may have described the Orion Nebula within their “Three Hearthstones” creation myth, as the triangle formed by these three stars resembles a traditional Mayan hearth. To them, the nebula may have represented the last smoldering ember of creation. But it has lingered long enough to throw off still another spark: Amateur astronomer Andrew Ainslie photographed the Orion Nebula in 1883 with a long exposure, demonstrating that long exposures could allow scientists to capture new stars and nebulae not otherwise visible to the human eye.

Hubble’s View of Jupiter and Europa

Here’s the first photo Hubble ever took of Jupiter, from March 11, 1991. This is from before Hubble got its glasses, and NASA’s original caption notes, “This picture is as sharp as the Voyager pictures taken five days before the closest approach in 1979.”

Jupiter and Europa (foreground right) as seen by Hubble in 1991

Credit: NASA

And, for comparison, here’s Jupiter (again paired with Europa) as seen by Hubble in August 2020:

This photo of Jupiter taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in August 2020 shows Europa and a number of Jupiter’s cloud features, including the Great Red Spot.

Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center), M. H. Wong (University of California, Berkeley), The OPAL team

Astronomers have long known that Jupiter’s cloud belts and Great Red Spot are dynamic, active systems, but the modern cameras on Juno and Hubble have allowed us to observe these features in unprecedented detail. Sometimes the most entrancing photos of the natural world are the ones you find in your own cosmic backyard.

Shoemaker-Levy 9

The plethora of impact craters scattered across the solar system are proof that comet and asteroid impacts are fairly common events on geologic time scales, but catching one on camera? That’s only happened once.

The aftermath of Shoemaker-Levy 9’s impact and the dark opacities it created within Jupiter’s atmosphere.

Credit: NASA, R. Evans, J. Trauger, H. Hammel, The HST Comet Science Team

In July 1994, Hubble captured the multi-stage impact of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 as it punched into Jupiter’s atmosphere over a six-day period. The impact dredged up material from deeper levels of Jupiter’s atmosphere than we can typically observe, leaving splashes that were visible for months as a series of dark, irregular spots.

Andromeda

In 2015, NASA released a gigantic composite photo of the Andromeda Galaxy, dubbed Gigapixels of Andromeda, that still stands as one of the largest images ever taken. The image data used to build the composite came from 411 separate Hubble exposures over a three-year period and show an area of the Andromeda Galaxy roughly 61,000 light-years across. The original (GIGANTIC) image was 69,536 by 22,230, which image aficionados will recognize as somewhat larger than 4K. It is so improbably huge that it might be best explored using the ESA’s zoomable version. Here are the highlights:

The Hubble Space Telescope’s composite shot of the galaxy Andromeda, assembled from several hundred separate images taken over a period of several years.

(a) Clusters of bright blue stars embedded within the galaxy, background galaxies seen much farther away, and photo-bombing by a couple bright foreground stars that are actually inside our Milky Way; (b) NGC 206 the most conspicuous star cloud in Andromeda; (c) A young cluster of blue newborn stars; (d) The satellite galaxy M32, that may be the residual core of a galaxy that once collided with Andromeda; (e) Dark dust lanes across myriad stars. Credit: NASA, ESA, Benjamin F. Williams (UWashington), Zhuo Chen (UWashington), L. Clifton Johnson (Northwestern); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)

The Andromeda Galaxy is the nearest major galaxy to our own Milky Way, and there’s an estimated 50% chance that the Milky Way and Andromeda will collide—in roughly a billion years.

Late-Game for a Galactic Merger

Here’s what it looks like while two galaxies are actively merging. This galaxy, IC 1623, is roughly 250 million light-years away in the constellation Cetus and is estimated to be roughly 115,000 light-years in diameter, making it modestly larger than our own Milky Way (estimated at roughly 87,400 light-years).

IC 1623 as captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. Image shows two galaxies in the active state of merging.

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Chandar

There are several active stellar nurseries within IC 1623, and potentially a supermassive black hole forming in the southwestern section of the merged galaxy. The overall rate of star formation may be as much as 20x higher than in our own galaxy.

Zombie Stars in This ‘Peculiar’ Galaxy (ESO 162-17)

This image of galaxy ESO 162-17 doesn’t immediately jump out as unusual, but there are several areas that warrant a closer look. ESO 162-17 is classified as a “peculiar galaxy,” meaning it has an unusual shape, size, or composition. It lacks the defined spiral arms of the Milky Way and may be the fully merged end stage of one or more galactic collisions. The bright blue stars in the lower left-hand corner may have ignited as part of this process.

Galaxy ESO 162-17 is a “peculiar galaxy,” with an unusual shape. This image shows ESO 162-17 and a nearby Type 1ax supernova.

Credit: NASA/ESA/ESO

To the left of ESO 162-17 is a relatively rare type of supernova, known as a Type 1ax. In a typical Type 1a supernova, a white dwarf orbiting a companion star strips material from its neighbor until the volume of material reaches critical mass and explodes, completely dissipating the original star. A 1ax supernova follows the same pattern, except the detonation is partial and leaves behind stellar remnant also known as a zombie star.

Hubble Ultra-Deep Field

Roughly a decade after the initial Hubble Deep Field survey, NASA a second shot at the idea. This time, the Ultra Deep Field focused on the constellation Fornax and captured an estimated 10,000 galaxies (compared to just 3,000 in the initial image). Despite the increased object density, the total area surveyed to create the UDF is actually smaller than the initial HDF, at roughly one 26-millionth of the sky as opposed to one 24-millionth.

The Hubble Ultra-Deep Field, with roughly 10,000 visible objects.

Credit: NASA, ESA

For this survey, Hubble deliberately focused on an area of the night sky with as few bright foreground stars as possible. The objects captured within the survey include galaxies that may have formed just 400 to 800 million years after the Big Bang. Surveys like this have helped us calculate galactic redshift and rates of stellar formation in the early days of the universe. The most redshifted galaxies tend to be smaller and less symmetrical than those closer to our own, and these differences help shed light on how conditions in the early universe differed from today.

Cat’s Eye Nebula

The Cats Eye Nebula sits in the constellation Draco and was first discovered in 1786 by William Huggins. His investigation included an evaluation of the nebula’s spectrum, demonstrating that so-called planetary nebulae were gaseous, rather than stellar.

The Cat’s Eye Nebula in bright pink, with purple circles down the middle, and green arcs at top and bottom.

Credit: NASA/ESA/NRAO/Chandra X-Ray Observatory

The image above was created by combining Hubble imagery with X-ray data from the Chandra Observatory. Processed to reveal its concentric rings and relying on Hubble-only data, it looks like this:

Hubble views the Cat’s Eye Nebula, this time in cool blues and orange, with concentric rings showing its nature as a planetary nebula.

Credit: NASA/ESA

One factor that makes the Cat’s Eye Nebula particularly significant is that we still don’t know exactly how its complex shape came to be. It is a nested structure of gaseous bubbles that connect and interact with each other in ways we’re still untangling. It’s possible that the star at its center may be a binary star, and that mass transfer between these two bodies could create astronomical jets that interact with already-expelled material. The concentric rings may have been ejected when the star was still on the main sequence.

NGC 4395

NGC 4395 is a Seyfert galaxy, or a galaxy with a very bright core. It sits roughly 14 million light-years from Earth and, despite being classified as a Seyfert galaxy, is one of the closest and dimmest known galaxies of its type.

The larger Hubble image shows the central region of NGC 4395 along with a smaller Digital Sky Survey inset image, lower-left corner, that reveals the location of the Hubble image in the wider context of the entire galaxy.

Credit: NASA/Hubble Mission Team

It was discovered in 1786 by William Herschel and is unusual for having no discernible galactic bulge and for its status as a dwarf galaxy. NGC 4395 features a relatively low-mass supermassive black hole, with a mass equivalent to 10,000 of our Sun, according to NASA. While not particularly small by the standards of a star, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*, has an estimated mass of roughly 3.6 million solar masses.

Spiral, Elliptical, or Neither?

This is NGC 2775, known as Caldwell 48. It’s officially classified as an unbarred spiral galaxy with flocculent (meaning fluffy) spiral arms. (To my eye, it looks like nothing quite so much as the Furmark donut.)

NGC 2775 (Caldwell 48) is shown here as a fluffy pale yellow disc against a backdrop of stars.

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, F. Belfiore, J. Lee and the PHANGS-HST Team

NGC 2775 mixes the features of elliptical and spiral galaxies, with the smooth featureless center of the latter and the dusty ring with patchy star clusters typical of the former. It may be a lenticular galaxy—some astronomers classify it as such—but its angle of inclination relative to Earth makes it hard to tell for sure.

Capturing Candyfloss Clouds

This striking candyfloss cloudscape hails from the Large Magellanic Cloud. The LMC is both a dwarf galaxy and a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, with roughly 1% of our galaxy’s mass. This image combines data from multiple Hubble image filters, including ultraviolet and infrared light. The color in such images has been adjusted to hues that humans can see, and such shots inevitably involve a bit of artistic license with the final visual.

A nebula within the Large Magellanic Cloud. It is made of gas and dust clouds in many different shades, with a range of red and blue stars visible behind.

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Murray

The Large Magellanic Cloud was first observed by Amerigo Vespucci in 1503 and 1504, but it’s named for Ferdinand Magellan, who sighted it during his voyage around the world in 1519. It’s home to the Tarantula Nebula, currently believed to be the most active starburst region in all of the galaxies that comprise the Local Group.

Earendel

Earendel, also known as WHL0137-LS (see what I mean about motherboard manufacturers?) is currently the most distant star or star cluster ever captured by the HST, at a comoving distance of 28 billion light-years. Its exact nature is still under investigation—it may be a star or star cluster—and the object is only visible thanks to gravitational lensing, which has magnified its light by somewhere between 1000x and 40,000x.

The star (or star cluster) Earendel, as imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope. Light from Earendel only reached Earth due to extreme gravitational lensing.

Credit: NASA, ESA, Brian Welch (JHU), Dan Coe (STScI)

Earendel is named for an Old English word meaning “morning star” or “rising light.” The name is en homage to J.R.R. Tolkien’s character Eärendil, who voyages across the great ocean Belegaer to beg aid from the Vala of Valinor. The Vala answer Eärendil’s plea, but at a price: Eärendil is tasked to sail the sky ever afterwards, bearing a Silmaril upon his brow. Thousands of years later, Galadriel would capture this light from the basin of her mirror and make a gift of it to Frodo.

Messier 51

Messier 51a, AKA NGC 5194, AKA the Whirlpool Galaxy is messier (I’m NOT sorry) than most of the other Hubble images we’ve evaluated, and all the more glorious for it. It’s the first galaxy to be classified as a spiral galaxy and can be seen with binoculars. Messier 51 was known to humans before we’d discovered that other galaxies existed and was initially classified as a spiral nebula.

The Whirlpool Galaxy (Messier 51a) and its dwarf galaxy companion, NGC 5195, are shown here in a shot from the Hubble Space Telescope. Messier 51a is an estimated 24 - 31 million light-years from Earth.

Credit: NASA/ESA

The visible attachment between NGC 5194 and its dwarf galaxy companion, NGC 5195, has been studied by astronomers for generations. It’s a young galaxy at an estimated 400 million years old. NGC 5195 may have passed through Messier 51 one or more times while it was forming, creating the distinctive spiral arms that make this pair so visually distinct.

Dark Clouds in the Carina Nebula

Elsewhere in the Carina Nebula, there are striking dark areas of opacity, known as molecular clouds. These are areas of space where gas density is high enough to meaningfully occlude visible light, even though the clouds in question are typically much less dense than Earth’s atmosphere.

Dark nebular clouds of the Carina Nebula as captured by Hubble.

Hubble image: NASA, ESA, N. Smith (University of California, Berkeley), and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA). CTIO data: N. Smith (University of California, Berkeley) and NOAO/AURA/NSF Credit: Public Domain (NASA/STScI/ESA)

The Carina Nebula is roughly four times larger than the Orion Nebula and contains one of the largest and most luminous stars ever discovered, Eta Carinae. The entire structure is about 300 light-years across and 7,500 light-years away, in the constellation it is named for.

A Rose by Any Other Name

For Hubble’s 21st anniversary in 2011, NASA imaged Arp 273, a pair of galaxies some 300 million light-years away in the constellation Andromeda. UGC 1810 and UGC 1813 are another pair of so-called “peculiar” galaxies, with shapes that deviate from the expected norm. In this case, the deviations line up (as seen from Earth) in a shape that broadly recalls a rose.

The galactic pair Arp 273, consisting of UGC 1810 (top) and UGC 1813 (bottom). The combination of the two looks rather like a rose from Earth’s vantage point.

Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

The bright blue stars along the top of NGC 1810 are young and highly energetic. The core of UGC 1813 is also believed to be an area of active star formation. Starbursts may have kicked off in both galaxies when UGC 1813 passed through UGC 1810 at some point in the past. Malformed spirals and odd bulges are tell-tale signs of gravitational interactions on the galactic scale, and Arp 273 offers up both in spades.

The Monkey Head Nebula

For its 24th anniversary, Hubble focused on starburst regions within NGC 2174, also known as the Monkey Head Nebula. The MHN isn’t particularly easy to see in visible light, but infrared reveals a beautiful contradiction between the nebula’s protostars and the clouds of gas and dust they eject.

Four images showcasing star formation within the Monkey Head Nebula, released for Hubble’s 24th anniversary.

Credit: NASA

NGC 2174 is an excellent example of why scientists emphasize the ability to measure stellar phenomenon in a wide range of wavelengths. Hubble emphasizes visible light, unlike the James Webb Space Telescope, which tilts towards infrared measurements, but Hubble can see into the infrared and ultraviolet spectrums as well. That capability serves the telescope well here. The early stars within the nebula may eject large quantities of gas, but they heat it to glowing in the process, creating a rich tapestry of color in the infrared spectrum.

Bubble Nebula

The Bubble Nebula, NGC 7635, is one of my personal favorites. NGC 7635 is an emission nebula. Emission nebulae are typically created when the solar wind from a particularly hot star ionizes and propels layers of gas away from itself. In some cases, emission nebulae are created by the activity of multiple young stars, but BD+60°2522 is thought to have managed this all on its own.

Look, it’s a bubble! In space! The Bubble Nebula, NGC 7635, an emission nebula created by the young star BD+60°2522.

Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Astronomers haven’t reached a consensus on exactly what kind of star BD+60°2522 is, beyond “really bright” and “really big,” but it’s thought to be roughly 2 million years old and halfway through its life on the main sequence. The larger a star, the faster it dies, and BD+60°2522 is already losing roughly a millionth of the Sun’s mass every year to its visible solar wind.

The Perseus Molecular Cloud

For Hubble’s 33rd anniversary, astronomers chose to image the star forming region known as NGC 1333, located in the Perseus molecular cloud. It’s one of the closer phenomena we’ve discussed in this post, at just 960 light-years away. The darkness of the cloud obscures several hundred newly formed stars—according to NASA, they’re hidden behind a veil of what’s essentially soot.

The Perseus molecular cloud as captured by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2023. The image shows a stellar nursery with dense clouds of molecular dust that obscure visibility into its interior. A blue star occupies the top of the image, yellow stars populate the center, and the bottom of the image shows a dramatic splash of red from deep inside the nebula.

Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI

Strong stellar winds from the blue star at the top of the image have scattered dust throughout blue wavelengths, while the bottom of the image offers a “keyhole” view deep into the nebula and its clouds of ionized hydrogen gas. NASA characterizes the thin jets as equivalent to the birth announcement for a star. Our own Sun may have been born in a similar stellar nursery billions of years ago.

Zoom and Fly-Through: Hubble Extreme Deep Field (HXDF)

What comes after the Deep Field and the Ultra Deep Field? If you guessed “Extreme,” you’re both correct and likely depressed that NASA astronomers aren’t better at naming things than this. Still, we’d hardly live up to our name if we didn’t include it.

It’s easy to forget now that the James Webb Space Telescope has taken over as our premiere observatory for the distant past, but Hubble was instrumental in helping astronomers understand the structure and stellar distribution within the early universe. The Hubble Extreme Deep Field focuses on an even smaller area of the sky and combined its footage with archival information to peer back in time at 5,500 galaxies over 13 billion years.

The Hubble Extreme Deep Field, created in 2012 with new images combined with archival data. At the time, this represented the most distant possible look into our universe’s past.

Credit: NASA; ESA; G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch, University of California, Santa Cruz; R. Bouwens, Leiden University; and the HUDF09 Team

Galaxies in the foreground of the image represent larger, more mature structures while the galaxies from >9B years ago are often smaller and blazing with young stars.

LEDA 803211

Some of the images in this list were chosen because they highlighted a particularly interesting facet of galaxies or relationships between stellar objects. Some, like LEDA 803211, are both. LEDA 803211 is a bit of a lesson on gravitational lensing—and how difficult it can be to judge distance in space.

The galaxy LEDA 803211 is in the center of this image, with several Milky Way stars occupying the foreground and an excellent example of gravitational lensing at the top.

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Erb

NASA rang in 2025 with this image, which shows stars within our Milky Way in the foreground, a bright more centrally located star at just 3,230 light-years away, and the galaxy LEDA 803211, 622 million light-years from us. According to NASA, the relatively near stars can be identified by “their characteristic diffraction spikes,” while more distant objects lack them. Above LEDA, there’s an indistinct galaxy entirely encircled by its own ring of light. This is a known characteristic of gravitational lensing, in which the light from a distant object is warped and deflected by the gravity of a massive foreground object. Galaxies and black holes can both create this effect, and taking advantage of it has helped scientists see further back in time than they otherwise would.

Hubble and the Cosmic Distance Ladder

Astronomers have used the Hubble Space Telescope to calculate how fast the universe is expanding and how far away various objects are from Earth, part of a scale called the cosmic distance ladder. These calculations depend on things like Cepheid variable stars: uncommon stars whose radial pulsing makes them brighten and dim on a regular basis. By calculating the amount of time it takes such a star to dim and brighten again, scientists can measure how far away it is.

This image explains how Cepheid variables and Type 1a supernovas are used by astronomers to calculate the Hubble constant and the universe’s rate of expansion.

Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Field (STScI)

At greater distances, Cepheid variable stars in our galaxy are compared against Cepheid variable stars in other galaxies, as well as against Type 1a supernovas. Both phenomena serve as a type of standard candle, meaning objects whose luminosity we know, allowing us to calculate their distance from Earth. The Hubble constant—named for Edwin Hubble, as opposed to the telescope itself—is the rate at which the universe is expanding.

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I hope this tour through Hubble’s 35-year history has shed some light on how this uniquely valuable telescope has expanded our understanding of the cosmos, from inside our own solar system to the farthest reaches of space. Here’s to many years of successful space telescope science—to infinity, and beyond!