A huge collection of Photos and Movies from the Hubble Telescope Archives. Features remarkableclose-ups of distant galaxies and stars and lots of colorful nebulas.

Hubble Space Telescope (HST), the first general-purpose orbiting observatory. Named after American astronomer Edwin P. Hubble, the Hubble Space Telescope was launched on April 24, 1990. The HST makes observations in the visible and ultraviolet regions of the electromagnetic spectrum.

The primary mirror of the HST has a diameter of 94.5 in (240 cm), and the optics of the telescope are designed so that, theoretically, when making a visible-light observation, the telescope can resolve astronomical objects that are an angular distance of 0.05 arcsecond apart. (Traditional large ground-based telescopes under very good sky conditions have an image resolution of about 0.5 arcsecond.) 

Originally, the HST was equipped with five detectors: the Wide-Field Planetary Camera, the Faint Object Camera, the Faint Object Spectrograph, the High-Resolution Spectrograph, and the High Speed Photometer. It also has three fine guidance sensors that can be used for precision astronomy measurements such as determining the distances of stars from the earth. After the HST was launched, scientists discovered that its primary mirror had a systematic aberration, the result of a manufacturing error. A service mission was carried out in December 1993 using the space shuttle Endeavor. A corrective optical device, called the Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement (COSTAR), was inserted in the slot for the High Speed Photometer, which had to be removed to make room for COSTAR. The Wide-Field Planetary Camera, which had a different optical path from the other four instruments, was replaced with a second camera, which has a built-in correction for the aberration in the primary mirror. The service mission, which involved numerous intricate procedures, was successful. Even before the aberration was corrected, the HST produced many valuable images, such as images showing mysterious dark structures in the spiral galaxy M51. Now that the HST has the resolving power it was designed to have, it is capable of performing such research as significantly improving the calculation of the rate at which galaxies are receding from the Milky Way as a function of their distances. This data could then be used to calculate the age of the universe.

In June 1994 a team of American scientists announced that the HST had provided the first convincing evidence of the existence of a black hole: The acceleration of gases around the center of the galaxy M87 indicates the presence of an object with a mass 2.5 billion to 3.5 billion times greater than that of the sun. In addition, the HST provided one of the best available views of the planet Jupiter when fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 bombarded the planet in July 1994. The HST's detailed images of the collisions provided scientists with data for a spectral analysis of the chemical makeup of Jupiter's atmosphere.

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