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This week marked a celestial milestone as the Hubble Space Telescope celebrated its 35th anniversary. Launched on April 24, 1990 aboard the space shuttle Discovery, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) / European Space Agency (ESA) observatory revolutionised astronomy by peering into the universe with a clarity once thought impossible.
To honour its decades of discovery, here are some of the most captivating images captured by the telescope.
Captured on August 25, 2020, this image showcased Hubble’s crisp view of Jupiter and its icy moon Europa, snapped from a distance of 653 million kilometres. The image revealed a dynamic new storm forming and a striking colour shift in one of the planet’s atmospheric features, reinforcing Hubble’s role in planetary weather monitoring.
This vibrant scene featured the nebulae NGC 2014 and NGC 2020 — colossal star-forming regions in the Large Magellanic Cloud, about 163,000 light-years from Earth. The image, taken during Hubble’s 30th year, stood out as one of the most photogenic examples of stellar nurseries ever captured.
Released for Hubble’s 25th anniversary, this portrait of the star cluster Westerlund 2 combined visible and infrared light data to reveal a radiant cosmic cradle. The image underscored Hubble’s longevity and its evolving toolkit, thanks to five astronaut servicing missions that upgraded its instruments.
Hubble returned to one of its most beloved targets — the Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula — with a visible-light image showing gas and dust sculpted by intense stellar radiation. With improved resolution, astronomers could better track how these structures change over time.
This rare Einstein ring — one of the most complete ever found — was produced by gravitational lensing in the Fornax constellation. Dubbed the “Molten Ring,” the distorted light from a background galaxy wrapped around a massive foreground galaxy, illustrating Einstein’s general theory of relativity in action.