This April the Hubble Space Telescope turns 25 years old. While Hubble has helped astronomers make important scientific discoveries, it’s most famous for the beautiful photographs it’s produced of outer space. And while the technology that created these images was groundbreaking when Hubble was launched into orbit in 1990, Hubble also pioneered a style of space photography that was just as revolutionary.
Elizabeth Kessler, an art history professor at Stanford University, has written a book about the aesthetics of the Hubble images, Picturing the Cosmos. Kessler says before Hubble, most photographs of space were in black and white. Color photos from the Voyager missions in the 70s and 80s were psychedelic, Kessler explains, with vivid, electric colors. Hubble’s photos look more like the shades we might see in a landscape of the Southwest. Skies tend to be blue, celestial bodies in reds and yellow. So a jet of gas unimaginably large looks like a dramatic outcropping of rock at a national park. That’s not an accident. Hubble’s photos are created by human image processors from gigabytes of data, and those specialists make aesthetic choices that make the cosmos look more familiar.
New photos from Hubble still light up the internet, but NASA has stopped all missions to repair the telescope. When it stops functioning, NASA will steer it back and let it fall into the sea. But work has begun on the James Webb Space Telescope, expected to launch in 2018. Astronomers hope the Webb telescope will give us more clues into the birth of the universe — and, of course, take pretty pictures.
Special thanks to Felice Frankel and Dr. David DeVorkin.
Slideshow: Photographs from the Hubble Telescope
Music Playlist
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Biome
Artist: Melodium -
When You Wish Upon a Star (From Pinocchio)
Artist: The Dave Brubeck QuartetAlbum: Brubeck At the MoviesLabel: Gralin Music -
Broken
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Apprentice of The Rocket Man
Artist: Angus StoneAlbum: Broken Brights
This cloud of gas and dust is a large portion of the Eagle Nebula, a dense star-forming region. Released in 2005, this photo from the Hubble Space Telescope shows a spire that is approximately 57 trillion miles high — about twice the distance from our Sun to the next nearest star. (Click here to enlarge)
(NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team STScI/AURA)
“The Pillars of Creation” shows a detail of the larger Eagle Nebula. This view, released in 1995, is one of the Hubble Space Telescope’s most iconic images: NASA directly compared the formation to “buttes in the desert.” This photo is composed of three layers, each showing reflected light from a separate element: sulfur, hydrogen, and oxygen.
(NASA, ESA, STScI, J. Hester and P. Scowen (Arizona State University))
In 2014, NASA released a new version of “The Pillars of Creation” that includes a wider view of the formation and a sharper image taken with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3. This is also a composite image showing light reflected from oxygen, sulfur, and nitrogen.
(NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA))
In January 2015, NASA released yet another new view of “The Pillars of Creation,” this time measuring the nebula’s near-infrared light. While previous views of the area measured visible light, this view shows stars hidden within and behind the pillar’s clouds of dust.
(NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA))
This Hubble image shows a structure within the Carina Nebula popularly known as the “Keyhole Nebula.” NASA calls the Carina Nebula “one of the outstanding features of the Southern-Hemisphere portion of the Milky Way.”
(NASA, The Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI))
Hubble’s view of the Orion Nebula includes more than 3,000 stars. Art historian Elizabeth Kessler says the image is notable because NASA directly compares the nebula to the composition of a traditional landscape, writing “these stars reside in a dramatic dust-and-gas landscape of plateaus, mountains, and valleys that are reminiscent of the Grand Canyon.”
(NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA))
For this image of Planetary Nebula NGC 3132, the colors were selected to show the temperature of the formation’s gases. The hottest gases at the center are blue, and the cooler outer edges fade to red. Kessler suggests that by creating a “temperature map,” this image mirrors a hot spring one might find in Yellowstone National Park.
(The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA/NASA))
This is the first of Hubble’s Deep Field images,exposed over ten days in 1995. Scientists pointed Hubble at a dark patch of sky — the area was selected because it allowed the telescope to collect light through a “deep,” or long, exposure. The results astonished scientists, revealing previously unknown galaxies and offering a glimpse of a much younger universe. The results were deemed so important that Hubble has since made four more Deep Field exposures.
(NASA, ESA, R. Ellis (Caltech), and the UDF 2012 Team)
Captured in an image from 2002, the Tadpole Galaxy is a series of young blue stars and clusters. The color blue was chosen to reflect the discernibly high heat of these stars, which are 1 million times brighter and ten times hotter than our sun. Hubble’s image of the Tadpole Galaxy is notable in that it combines the depth of the Deep Field images with the more aesthetically striking galaxy that lies in its foreground.
(NASA, H. Ford (JHU), G. Illingworth (UCSC/LO), M.Clampin (STScI), G. Hartig (STScI), the ACS Science Team, and ESA)