Hubble Space Telescope as seen from the Space Shuttle.

A galaxy has been discovered only ten million light years away and has 100 million stars.

This is a NASA Hubble Space Telescope ultraviolet-light image of the planet Venus, taken on January 24, 1995, when Venus was at a distance of 70.6 million miles from Earth. Venus is covered with clouds made of sulfuric acid, rather than the water- vapor clouds found on Earth.

This portrait of Mars was taken on March 10. 1997, just before the Red Planet made one of its closest passes to Earth about 60 million miles or 100 million kilometers.

On June 26, 2001, when Mars was approximately 43 million miles from Earth – Hubble snapped this picture. The colors have been carefully balanced to gave a realistic view of Mars’ hues as they might appear through a telescope.

This color image of Saturn was taken on August 26, 1990, when the planet was at a distance of 1.39 million kilometers (860 million miles) from Earth.

The false-color image – taken January 4, 1998 – shows the planet’s reflected infrared light. This view provides detailed information on the clouds and hazes in Saturn’s atmosphere.

Here is a picture of Saturn taken by the Hubble Telescope in ultraviolet light. The glowing swirling material at Saturn’s poles is its auroral “curtains,” rising more than a thousand miles above the cloud tops.

This is the first true-color photograph of Jupiter taken by the Hubble Telescope taken on May 28, 1991.

These spots are actually a rare alignment of three of Jupiter’s largest moons – Io, Ganymede, and Callisto – across the planet’s face. In this image, the telltale signatures of this alignment are the shadows (the three black circles) cast by the moons.

This ultraviolet image shows Jupiter’s atmosphere after many impacts by fragments of comet Shoemaker-Levy-9.

This spectacular color panorama of the center of the Orion Nebula is one of the largest pictures ever from individual images taken with the Hubble telescope (1995).

This picture of the Keyhole Nebula was taken by the Hubble Telescope in the year 2000.

NGC 1512 is a barred spiral galaxy located 30 million light-years away. The galaxy spans 70,000 light years, nearly as much as our galaxy. This picture was taken on May 31, 2001.

Perhaps one of the most famous and easily recognized space objects, the Eagle Nebula (also known as Messier Object 16, M16 or NGC 6611) is a young open cluster of stars. The release date was November 2, 1995.

Giant galaxies weren’t assembled in a day. Neither was this Hubble Space Telescope image.

The Crab Nebula is a six-light-year-wide expanding remnant of a star’s supernova explosion. Japanese and Chinese astronomers recorded this violent event nearly 1,000 years ago in 1054, as did, almost certainly, Native Americans.

Located an estimated 13 billion light-years away, the object is being viewed at a time only 750 million years after the big bang, when the universe was barely 5 percent of its current age.

Galaxy NGC 3949 is similar to our Milky Way. This galaxy has a blue disk of young stars peppered with bright pink star-birth regions. The bright central bulge is made up of mostly older, redder stars.

In 1995, the majestic spiral galaxy NGC 4414 was imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope and is 60 million light years distant from our galaxy.

The Whirlpool galaxy, M51, has been one of the most photogenic galaxies in amateur and professional astronomy. Easily photographed and viewed by smaller telescopes, this celestial beauty is studied extensively.

The jumble of galaxies in this image, taken in September 2003, includes a yellow spiral whose arms have been stretched by a possible collision [lower right]; a young, blue galaxy [top] bursting with star birth; and several smaller, red galaxies.

Two spiral galaxies pass by each other like majestic ships in the night. Trapped in their mutual orbit around each other, these two galaxies will continue to distort and disrupt each other.

This image is of an expanding halo of light around a distant star, named V838 Monocerotis. The illumination of interstellar dust comes from the red supergiant star at the middle of the image, which gave off a flashbulb-like pulse of light.

http://heritage.stsci.edu/gallery/gallery.html

http://hubble.nasa.gov/multimedia/astronomy.php

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