Hubble Celebrate 25 Years In Orbit

It’s been a quarter of a century since Discovery left the planet Earth and dropped the Hubble Telescope off in the depths of space, and it’s now treated us to some stunning new images…
The Hubble Telescope will this year celebrate its 25th year in orbit. On 24th April 1990 the space shuttle Discovery took off with the telescope on board, releasing it into space the following day. It’s remarkable just how far we’ve come in terms of our knowledge of the universe; simply looking through the gallery of images on the Hubble website is enough to make us all feel like the insignificant lifeforms we all truly are in the grand scheme of space.
Considering that Hubble operations have produced more than 100 terabytes of data, the telescope itself is powered by some pretty old tech. Hubble is run on a pre-Pentium Intel 80486 microchip which was installed in the December of 1999 no less (yep, that’s nearly 16 years ago!).
As a part of its 25th anniversary celebrations, the Hubble Telescope has revisited one of its most famous photos, releasing a new image of the “Pillars of Creation”. Advances in technology and upgrades to Hubble’s system mean that this image, captured 20 years on from the original 1995 image, has a wider angle and two times the resolution.

[image from NASA]
The “pillars” that can be seen in the image are formed from hydrogen gas, acting as incubators for new stars. However, if we could transport ourselves to the Eagle Nebula within which the pillars have been photographed, we’d find an entirely different view as they are almost 7000 light years away from our planet.
We’re geeking out over here! We can’t wait to see what else Hubble has in store for us in its 25th year…