Hubble Captures a Butterfly

The images taken by the newly refurbished Hubble Space Telescope are amazing

This week at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., Senator Barbara A. Mikulski, a Democrat from Maryland, officially unveiled striking new images taken by the completely renovated Hubble Space Telescope, including "colorful, multi-wavelength pictures of far-flung galaxies, a densely packed star cluster, an eerie 'pillar of creation,' and a 'butterfly' nebula," according to September 9 NASA press release.

Sen. Mikulski, chairwoman of the Commerce, Justice and Science Appropriations Subcommittee that funds NASA, was a strong proponent of the funding of the mission by the crew of the Space Shuttle Atlantis last May to repair Hubble.

Currently in its full phase of science observation in a low orbit around Earth, Hubble has provided a slew of remarkable images, most notably the Hubble Deep Field, a series of images taken from a tiny section of the constellation Ursa Major that reveal a slice of almost the entire history of time after the Big Bang.

But Hubble's time is coming to and end. In 2013, NASA will launch its replacement, the James Webb Space Telescope, which will carry a mirror six times bigger than our current orbiting eye on outer space.

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• View the new images taken by Hubble
  
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• See what's in the sky tonight
• Buy a beginner telescope from the Discovery Channel store ($99.00)

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• Blast From the Past (March 28, 2009)
• Captured on Film: The Personification of Dread (March 13, 2008)
• Kepler and the Gate to the Black Forest (February 15, 2009)
• Famous 400-Year-Old Star Death Observed (December 7, 2008)
• The Final Frontier According to Ptolemy, Kennedy, Hubble and Obama (November 17, 2008)

image: "Butterfly Emerges from Stellar Demise in Planetary Nebula NGC 6302. This celestial object looks like a delicate butterfly. But it is far from serene. What resemble dainty butterfly wings are actually roiling cauldrons of gas heated to more than 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The gas is tearing across space at more than 600,000 miles an hour -- fast enough to travel from Earth to the moon in 24 minutes. A dying star that was once about five times the mass of the Sun is at the center of this fury. It has ejected its envelope of gases and is now unleashing a stream of ultraviolet radiation that is making the cast-off material glow. This object is an example of a planetary nebula, so-named because many of them have a round appearance resembling that of a planet when viewed through a small telescope. The Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), a new camera aboard NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, snapped this image of the planetary nebula, catalogued as NGC 6302, but more popularly called the Bug Nebula or the Butterfly Nebula. WFC3 was installed by NASA astronauts in May 2009, during the servicing mission to upgrade and repair the 19-year-old Hubble telescope." (credit: NASA)