Twenty-five years ago today, Hubble launched into space, nestled in the bay of the Space Shuttle Discovery. Over those years, the space telescope produced the most inspiring images of the cosmos we humans had ever seen.
A great many of those eye-candy photos were created by one man, Zolt Levay, who joined the then-newly-formed Hubble organization in 1983 and has been there ever since. He’s the guy who takes the data that scientists collect with the telescope and re-mixes it into images made for public consumption.
When we decided to honor Hubble’s heritage with a gallery of 26 photos—one for each year of its orbital tenure, plus the official 25th-anniversary image—Levay seemed like the ideal person to curate it. Here are his picks.
