Great Observatories: Hubble Space Telescope

The Hubble Space Telescope is part of NASA's ﬂeet of "Great Observatories," which also includes the James Webb Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory. Since its 1990 launch, Hubble has changed our fundamental understanding of the universe.

This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image captures a triple-star star system.

$Three bright stars with diffraction spikes shine near the center-right of the image, illuminating nearby clouds that glow in pale blue. The clouds darken at the edges of the image, and are dotted with smaller stars, some also with diffraction spikes.$

This image shows knots of cold, dense interstellar gas where new stars are forming. These Free-floating Evaporating Gaseous Globules (frEGGs)...

This striking image features a relatively rare phenomenon, a Herbig-Haro object. Newly formed stars sometimes expel narrow jets of fast-moving...

a reddish haze pierced by a diagonal blue filament, against the black backdrop of space

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope reveals an ultraviolet view of Jupiter.

Jupiter looks iridescent in this ultraviolet image from the Hubble Space Telescope. The poles are a muted orange color, while swirls and stripes of pink, orange, blue, and purple cover the rest of the planet. Jupiter's "Great Red Spot" appears a deep blue here.

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope reveals the clearest view yet of the Egg Nebula. This structure of gas and dust was...

In the image center, an opaque oval cloud of gray gas aligned from 1 o’clock to 7 o’clock hides a star. Two strong beams of light from the star emerge from large holes in both sides of the cloud, forming narrow cones extending toward 10 o’clock and 4 o’clock. The central cloud is surrounded by concentric, wispy shells of gas illuminated by the star’s light. The shells reflect extra light where they’re hit by the twin beams. A crowd of smaller stars with cross-shaped spikes over them surrounds the nebula on a black background.

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of NGC 7722, a lenticular galaxy located about 187 million light-years away, features concentric...

A disk-shaped galaxy. It glows brightly at the center and shines a faint white light all around it. The disk is made up of tightly-packed rings of dust, some darker and some lighter. Wide, long lanes of dark reddish dust cross the galaxy in front of its edge, blocking out some of its light; the long strands twist and break apart at each side. A couple of nearby stars and distant galaxies are also visible on the black background.

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features a spiral galaxy, named UGC 10043. Located roughly 150 million light-years from Earth...

A spiral galaxy seen directly from the side, such that its disk looks like a narrow diagonal band across the image. A band of dark dust covers the disk in the center most of the way out to the ends, and the disk glows around that. In the center of the galaxy, a whitish circle of light bulges out above and below the disk. Each end of the disk curves slightly. The background is black and mostly empty.

N44 is a complex nebula filled with glowing hydrogen gas, dark lanes of dust, massive stars, and many populations of...

Upper 2/3 holds a bright white and blue gas and dust-cloud ring around a central void or bubble. Lower 1/3 holds blue and white "cotton ball" like clouds, several holding bright stars. Reddish-orange stars also dot the scene throughout.

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image captures the spiral galaxy NGC 1672 with a supernova.

A spiral galaxy with an oval-shaped disk. Two large arms curve out away from the ends of the disk. Bright pink patches and dark reddish threads of dust fill the arms. The bright pink patches indicate where stars are forming. The core is very bright and filled with stars. Some large stars appear in front of the galaxy. Directly under the point where the right arm joins the disk, a fading supernova is visible as a green dot.

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the spiral galaxy NGC 2566, which sits 76 million light-years away in the...

The spiral galaxy in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image is IC 3225. It looks remarkably as if it was...

A spiral galaxy with a disk that glows visibly from the center. It has faint dust threaded through it. A spiral arm curves around the left edge of the disk and is noticeably denser with bright blue spots that hold hot and new stars. On the opposite side, the disk stretches out into a short tail where it covers a distant background galaxy. Other distant galaxies and some nearby stars are visible are also visible in this image.

This collection of stars that shimmers like a fireworks display is NGC 3603, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope in...

NGC 3603, a young, glittering collection of stars, looks like an aerial burst.

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the spiral galaxy IC 4709 located around 240 million light-years away in the...

A spiral galaxy with a bright-white core, a glowing disk thick with swirling patterns of dark dust, and a faint halo around the disk. It is on a black background with a few small, distant galaxies and some foreground stars around it.

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have assembled a comprehensive picture of the evolving universe – among the most colorful...

These towering tendrils of cosmic dust and gas sit at the heart of M16, or the Eagle Nebula.

Hubble image of the Eagle Nebula, also called "The Pillars of Creation"

In this Hubble Space Telescope image, researchers has revisited one of Hubble's most iconic and popular images: the Eagle Nebula’s...

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope images NGC 7814, known as the "Little Sombrero.”

Edge-on galaxy, with a distinctive dust lane, extending from upper right to middle-left of the image. Distant galaxies dot the scene.

In a lonely patch of the universe, five tightly grouped galaxies engage in a leisurely dance.

Image released April 19, 2013. Astronomers have used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to photograph the iconic Horsehead Nebula in a...

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image is a wonderfully detailed snapshot of the spiral galaxy NGC 3430 that lies 100...

A spiral galaxy with three prominent arms wrapping around it. The galaxy holds plenty of extra gas and dark dust between the arms. There are shining blue points throughout the arms and some patches of gas out beyond the galaxy’s edge, where stars are forming. The center of the galaxy also shines brightly. It is on a dark background where some small orange dots mark distant galaxies.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of Saturn on July 4, 2020. Two of Saturn's icy moons are clearly...

Saturn and its rings appear to glow against the darkness of space. At right and at middle bottom, two small dots can be seen: they are two of Saturn's moons - Mimas and Enceladus, respectively. Saturn itself takes on a reddish tint in its northern hemisphere and blue at its bottom. The planet's concentric rings are an icy white.

Named RCW 7, the nebula is located just over 5300 light-years from Earth in the constellation Puppis. Nebulae are areas...

Clouds of gas and dust with many stars. The clouds form a flat, blue background toward the bottom, and become thicker and smokier toward the top. Stars on one side light the nebula. A thick arc of gas and dust reaches around from the bottom-right corner of the image toward the top-left corner. It begins as a dark and obscuring cloud at bottom right and gradually becomes brightly lit by many stars at the upper left. Other large, foreground stars lie between the nebula and the viewer.

To celebrate the 21st anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope's deployment into space, astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute...

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the globular cluster NGC 2005. It’s not an unusual globular cluster in and...

$A globular cluster that looks like a very dense, ball-shaped collection of many shining stars in colors of white, yellow-orange, and blue. Some stars appear a bit larger and brighter than others, with the brightest having faint cross-shaped diffraction spikes. The cluster’s stars are scattered mostly uniformly, with their density increasing toward the cluster’s core where they merge into a strong, bright-white glow.$

The magnificent central bar of NGC 2217 (also known as AM 0619-271) shines bright in the constellation of Canis Major...

$A bright, white galactic core shines near the center of the image with a faint bar of stars extending from it, diagonally to the right. Faint, hazy spiral arms encircle the core, with several distant stars and bright blue foreground stars with diffraction spikes scattered throughout the image, all against black space.$

The center of this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is framed by the tell-tale arcs that result from...

In celebration of the 34th anniversary of the launch of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers took a snapshot of the...

Taking up most of the image, is a multi-colored nebula in shades of blue, pink, yellow, orange, purple, and white. It appears as two translucent orbs attached by a white band.

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows LEDA 42160, a galaxy about 52 million light-years from Earth in the constellation...

$A distorted dwarf galaxy, obscured by dust and by bright outbursts caused by star formation, floats roughly in the center. Tendrils of gas stretch up from the plane of the galaxy. A few distant galaxies are visible in the background around it, many as little spirals, and also including a prominent elliptical galaxy. A bright star hangs above the galaxy in the foreground, marked by cross-shaped diffraction spikes. The galaxy appears in shades of white and blue, while the distant galaxies are spots of orange.$