Hubble telescope delivers stunning 30th birthday picture

[hunter]

It's 30 years ago to the day that the Hubble telescope was launched - and to celebrate its birthday, the veteran observatory has produced another astonishing image of the cosmos.

This one is of a star-forming region close to our Milky Way Galaxy, about 163,000 light-years from Earth.

The larger object is the nebula NGC 2014; its companion is called NGC 2020.

But astronomers have nicknamed the scene the "Cosmic Reef" because it resembles an undersea world.

--more--

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-52106420

The story of the Hubble's flawed mirror and the installation of corrective optics to compensate for it is fascinating.

Hubble has a lot in common with super-secret spy satellites and possibly suffered in the competition for resources, especially management and intellectual resources.

The Space Shuttle itself suffered similar problems.

[jeffreyi]

1. Wowsie.

[Judi Lynn]

2. Amazing. Thank you. n/t

[SinisterPants]

3. I grew up with Hubble, happy birthday baby!

Hubble has been a constant for most of my adult life. When it was launched there was no NASA live stream (hell, there was pretty much no internet).

Me and my nerd friends were obsessively scouring radio and TV for updates on the repair, for awhile it looked like Hubble would be NASA's biggest disaster since Apollo 1 caught fire on the launchpad, killing all 3 crew members.

Instead, shuttle astronauts were able to jimmy-rig it, and turn it into maybe NASA's most important project to date. We've probably learned more from Hubble that all the probe missions combined.

So raise a glass to the little telescope that could, and all the engineers who designed, fixed, and kept it humming.