2015 Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar

2015 Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar

Sublime!

December 1

A retake of one of the Hubble Space Telescope's most iconic and popular images: the Eagle Nebula's Pillars of Creation. This high-definition image shows the pillars as seen in visible light in late 2014, capturing the multi-colored glow of gas clouds, wispy tendrils of dark cosmic dust, and the rust-colored elephants' trunks of the nebula's famous pillars, 25 years after the earlier, more famous 1995 version. The dust and gas in the pillars is seared by intense radiation from young stars and eroded by strong winds from massive nearby stars. The tallest pillar here is about four light years in length, or about 24 trillion miles.

Christmas Eve

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Galaxies, galaxies everywhere - as far as the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope can see. This view of nearly 10,000 galaxies represents a "deep" core sample of the universe, cutting across billions of light years. The snapshot includes galaxies of various ages, sizes, shapes and colors. The smallest, reddest galaxies, about 100, may be among the most distant known, existing when the universe was just 800 million years old. The nearest galaxies - the larger, brighter, well-defined spirals and ellipticals - thrived about 1 billion years ago, when the cosmos was 13 billions years old. In vibrant contrast to the rich harvest of classic spiral and elliptical galaxies, there is a zoo of oddball galaxies littering the field. Some look like toothpicks; others are links on a bracelet. A few appear to be interacting. These oddball galaxies chronicle a period when the universe was younger and more chaotic. Order and structure were just beginning to emerge. In ground-based photographs, the patch of sky in which the galaxies reside, just one-tenth the diameter of the full Moon, is largely empty. Located in the constellation Fornax, the region is so empty that only a handful of stars within the Milky Way galaxy can be seen in the image. The total amount of exposure time was 11.3 days, taken between September 24, 2003 and January 15, 2004.