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Hubble's Deployment
The Hubble Space Telescope is photographed at the moment of release from space shuttle Discovery on April 25, 1990 as part of STS-31, the Space Shuttle's mission to deploy the observatory. -
First image of the WFPC
On the right is part of the first image taken with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope's (HST) Wide Field/Planetary Camera. It is shown with a ground-based picture from Las Campanas, Chile, Observatory of the same region of the sky. The Las Campanas picture was taken with a 100-inch telescope and its typical of high quality pictures obtained from the ground. All objects seen are stars within the Milky Way galaxy. -
First image of the FOC
Two views of a small (4.6 by 6.2 arcsecond) star field in the galactic cluster NGC 188 containing two stars separated by 2.9 arcseconds in the sky. Located at a distance of about 5,000 light years, both stars are far too remote for their surfaces to be resolved, and are therefore suitable point sources for evaluating optical imaging quality. -
30 Doradus
The accompanying illustration consists of four images of the remarkable cluster of tightly-packed young stars in the 30 Doradus Nebula, 160,000 light-years from Earth in the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy. -
Star Cluster R136 - Wide Field Planetary Camera (unprocessed image)
This unprocessed image, taken with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, yields stellar diameters of 0.1 arcsecond, allowing many more stars to be distinguished than in previous ground-based telescope images. -
NGC 7457's Nucleus
This Hubble Space Telescope view of galaxy NGC 7457, was taken on August 17, 1990 with the Wide Field/Planetary Camera. The picture on the left with high contrast shows the central portion of the galaxy. Predictably, the density of the starry population smoothly increases toward the galactic center. -
Supernova 1987A
HST has resolved, to an unprecedented detail of 0.1 arcsecond, a mysterious elliptical ring of material around the remnants of Supernova 1987A. -
Gravitational Lens G2237 + 0305 (Einstein Cross)
The European Space Agency's Faint Object Camera on board NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has provided astronomers with the most detailed image ever taken of the gravitational lens G2237 + 0305 – sometimes referred to as the "Einstein Cross." The photograph shows four images of a very distant quasar which has been multiple-imaged by a relatively nearby galaxy acting as a gravitational lens. The angular separation between the upper and lower images is 1.6 arcseconds. -
NGC 1068 and Nuclear Region - WFPC
A picture of the barred spiral galaxy NGC 1068, taken with the 0.9-m telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory shows the bright nucleus. The inset is an HST WF/PC narrow band image which shows clouds of ionized gas in the very center of the galaxy. -
Orion Nebula Montage
Constellation of Orion and ground-based image of Orion Nebula, copyright David Malin/Anglo-Australian Southern Observatory. -
R Aquarii
This is the first picture taken by HST of a recent nova, the star system R Aquarii. The two dark knots at the center of the image probably contain the binary star system itself, which consists of a red giant and white dwarf star. The knots are dark due to saturation effects produced by the FOC detector when it observes very bright objects. The filamentary features emanating from the core are hot gas (plasma) that has been ejected at high speeds from the binary pair.