Hubble Space Telescope turns 25 today , Happy Birthday Hubble

25 years of amasement , wonder and discovery.
It's probably one of our greatest scientific achievements to date and definitely my favourite of the scientific missions to explore Space and our part in it , Hubble has delivered some of the most memorable images of the last couple of decades such as the iconic Pillars of Creation , images that captured the public imagination and showed us the beauty that exists out there in the vastness of space.


And one of my favourites the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field , looking back in time approximately 13 billion years


Happy Birthday Hubble and thanks for the wonder.

Breathtaking images! Happy B day Hubble! Keep it up

Happy Birthday Hubble Space Telescope!

Largest image ever created, 1.5 billion pixels. It takes about 4.3 GB of disk space.

Amazing.

Whens the Hubble mark 2 going up ?

I remember the launch when I was young. I remember thinking to myself "wow, what an incredibly long time to do something". After all that work it seemed Hubble was a waste of time and money as he was born near sighted. Years later after giving him a munch needed pair of glasses and seeing the images I remember being in complete disbelief. Simply awed by the awesomeness.

And than I learned the cold hard truth. Hubble was really and inner galatic death beam sending our thought power wavelengths to Aliice.

...i kid, I kid.

Both pictures are truly amazing. Just to get a sense of the size of our universe, take the deep field picture for example. That is not an image of all of the known galaxies, that's one small spot of dark space the hubble focused on. The scale of the universe is incomprehensible. Oh and btw, we're the only ones in it.

I read this and got a little sad. As of now there is no direct replacement for the Hubble. The James Webb Space Telescope will be amazing but it works in the Infrared so the only pretty pictures (which is really why Hubble captured the imagination of the public) will be in false color.

We need a new Visual/UV space telescope in the 8-20 meter range when Hubble goes down.

a reply to: JadeStar

Jade, is there any estimate of when Hubble will fail/break/collapse-under-its-own-weight? Can it last another 25 years? And why aren't "they" making new Deep Fields on something like a one-a-month basis? These are my questions three. Thanks.

originally posted by: Aleister
a reply to: JadeStar
And why aren't "they" making new Deep Fields on something like a one-a-month basis?

They basically are. That's why I do Hubble Highlights videos like these, but I've fallen behind due to other projects. I'm working on a special video for Hubble's 25th.

a reply to: ngchunter

Thanks, nice videos. The semi-deep field in your first listed video was a total of 75 exposure minutes. Nice, more of those would be very good, yet if I was running the telescope I'd do at least a couple days of deep field exposure a month, maybe more. Never can know what new types of formations and shapes will show up in a deep field. If the Earthlings had more common sense and put their military money into space data, we'd have 100 or more Hubble-type telescopes in space and a full-sky deep-field well underway. To dream.