HST – Astronomy Now

The magic of gravity

28 June 2022 Keith Cooper

The great sculptor of the Universe is gravity. It is gravity’s force that assembles the galaxies into arrays of cartwheeling spirals, flocculant sunflowers and immense ellipticals.

NGC 1792: A beautiful tapestry of contrasting colour

16 June 2022 Keith Cooper

This dense, swirling spiral galaxy is NGC 1792, located 34.6 million light years away in the constellation of Columba, the Dove.

Celestial fireworks celebrate Hubble’s silver anniversary

24 April 2015 Astronomy Now

A brilliant tapestry of young stars flaring to life resemble a glittering fireworks display in the Hubble Space Telescope image chosen to commemorate the orbiting observatory’s quarter century of exploring the Solar System and beyond.

Space scientists pay homage to 25 years of the Hubble Space Telescope

23 April 2015 Astronomy Now

On April 24, 1990, the Space Shuttle Discovery achieved orbit with the Hubble Space Telescope in its payload bay. Since then, the HST has been serviced and upgraded five times, giving scientists the means to look farther out into the universe in greater detail and father back in time than ever before.

Distant supernova split four ways by gravitational lens

5 March 2015 Astronomy Now

An astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, has found a massive galaxy within the MACS J1149 galaxy cluster that is gravitationally bending and magnifying light to create four separate images of a distant supernova.

Spiral galaxy NGC 986 in the constellation of Fornax

Hubble captures spiral galaxy in the Furnace

17 November 2014 Ade Ashford

This new Hubble image is a snapshot of NGC 986 — a barred spiral galaxy in the southern constellation of Fornax (The Furnace), discovered by James Dunlop in 1828.