galaxies
Katie Peek / STSci, NASA
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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.

The pink-and-orange panorama of the Orion Nebula, which is enveloped by darker, colder gas

2006: The Orion Nebula, Revisited

Hubble joined forces with a Chilean telescope to create this shot, which is built from nearly a dozen separate pictures taken at different wavelengths—and which puts to shame the faint smudge visible with a backyard telescope.
Whirlpool galaxy, big spiral galaxy

2005: Whirlpool

Most of Hubble’s iconic images—including this one, of the nearby Whirlpool galaxy—were taken by its Advanced Camera for Surveys, or ACS. Hubble has six instruments on board, each optimized for taking different sorts of measurements. The ACS takes sharp images with a wide field of view, which has made it the pretty-picture workhorse since it was installed during a servicing mission in 2002. After a repair during the 2009 servicing mission, ACS is still going strong.
Stars and gas shining bright, in space

2015: The Official 25th-Anniversary Image

Bright, hot, young stars light up the gas around them, the gas from which they were born (yup, it’s that old Hubble theme). Even after a quarter century spent flying around the Earth at about 18,000 MPH, plunging from glaring sunlight to near-total darkness every 50 minutes, and circling the Earth more than 135,000 times, the old telescope still churns out stunners.
A bunch of galaxies in space as seen by Hubble

2014: Deep Look At A Galaxy Cluster

Hubble stared for 67 hours to create the deepest galaxy-cluster image ever taken. The big, bright foreground galaxies are bound together by their gravity, gravity that warps the light from the 3,000 background galaxies like a lens. Two other space telescopes flying at the time—Chandra, which takes pictures at x-ray wavelengths, and Spitzer, which catches longer-wavelength infrared glimpses—also turned to look at this patch of sky, creating picture of the cluster that’s nearly complete across the wavelengths of light.
A globby gray-and-white nebula surrounded by ring of orange-and-green nebula material

2000: The Eskimo Nebula

On November 13, 1999, one of Hubble’s gyroscopes failed. The gyros are six-inch-long cylinders that spin at 19,200 RPM, suspended in fluid. They detect and correct for tiny movements in the spacecraft, allowing Hubble to stare steadily at a single spot and take clear pictures. A single gyro failing isn’t a big deal—Hubble has six and only needs three to be operational at any moment—but the one that stopped spinning on that November day was the fourth one to break, and it sent Hubble into automatic shutdown. To fix the telescope, NASA fast-tracked a servicing mission it had been planning since the third gyro failure. A crew of astronauts went up in late December aboard the shuttle Discovery. They replaced all six gyroscopes, and Hubble resumed observing on January 10, 2000. This is the first picture it took.
Mars. A snapshot of the whole planet.

1999: Mars Has Its Close-Up

In the spring of 1999, Mars came closer to Earth than it had since Hubble’s launch, and the space telescope snapped plenty of pictures of the Red Planet. This one shows the water-ice polar cap of Mars’s northern hemisphere, light clouds of early morning along the left limb, and a cyclone churning near the pole. The landing site of the Mars Pathfinder rover, which had bounced onto the planet’s surface two years earlier, is at the center of the image—at the bottom of the big dark patch just below the icy north pole.
A rainbow zig-zag that runs in a line from top to bottom, with blue zigs on the left and red zags to the right.

1997: Spectrum Of A Black Hole

This psychedelic smudge is actually evidence of a black hole at the center of the galaxy M84. It was made with Hubble’s spectrograph, which shows the velocity of the material it images. It reveals those velocities along just one line, determined by how astronomers position the telescope. The squiggle halfway down means that stars are spinning very quickly around the galaxy’s center. And from that, astronomers could tell the black hole at the center of M84 is 300 million times as massive as the sun.
Thousands of galaxies as seen from Hubble

1996: The Hubble Deep Field

Remember when Robert Williams, the then-director of the Space Telescope Science Institute (that’s the folks who oversee Hubble) used a good chunk of his own observing time to point at a seemingly blank patch of sky for 10 days straight? And an unfathomably huge number of galaxies revealed themselves? And changed astronomers’ understanding of how the early universe worked? Wasn’t that awesome? Sometimes the big gamble pays off.
A blue-and-white, crystal-clear spiral galaxy viewed by Hubble in 1994.

1994: A Crystal-Clear Spiral Galaxy

On December 2, 1993, the crew of the Space Shuttle Endeavour began a 12-day mission to correct a flaw in Hubble’s vision. This image of the Whirlpool Galaxy celebrated the success of Servicing Mission One, as it was called, by showing off Hubble’s new view. Compare this image against the pre–servicing mission pic of the same galaxy.
An orange ring of gas at the core of the galaxy NGC 4261

1992: Black Hole At A Galaxy’s Core

When this image was taken, the existence of actual black holes were still uncertain enough that the Hubble press release called them “theoretical objects.” At the time, this was the best pic astronomers had of a candidate black hole. The orange light in the image is glowing gas and dust at the very center of a galaxy called NGC 4261. It’s bright at the very center because the gas heats up and glows just before being swallowed by the black hole.
A small bit of the edge of the Orion Nebula as seen by Hubble in 1991

1991: Detail Of The Orion Nebula

The Orion Nebula is the nearest giant-star nursery to Earth, so it was an important early target for Hubble. Many of the small dots here are stars with disks of dust around them, probably with planets forming inside. The discovery of the first planets outside our solar system would be announced the next year, in 1992. Strong evidence that stars with planets are common—a fact hinted at by the abundance of planet-forming disks here—is just being uncovered today.
A galaxy in the upper left of the image has a huge tail that stretches down to the lower right of the image

2002: The Tadpole

The name is apt: This is definitely a galaxy that looks like a tadpole. It had a run-in with the galaxy visible just behind it, and when galaxies collide (see previous) crazy things happen to them. Eventually, the long tail will break off entirely and become a mini galaxy that orbits the bigger ones.
A blue area of light encircled by orange gas, in space

2004: The Helix Nebula

Before this image, astronomers thought this nebula—gas and dust expelled from the star dying at its center—was donut-shaped. But with this 4.5-hour Hubble exposure and some other pictures taken from telescopes on the ground, they concluded it’s actually two disks of material sitting perpendicular to each other. And the disks may have been made by two stars instead of one. Even the most familiar objects in the sky have their secrets.
A handful of bright blue in a V shape, surrounded by orange and blue wisps of gas

2007: Starbirth

The bright blue stars at the center of this image are burning away the gas and dust they were born from, creating a lovely cocoon of material. If that scene sounds familiar, that’s because it’s a common one among Hubble targets. Gas and dust may not sound as thrilling as stars and galaxies, but they reflect and illuminate the objects of the heavens, creating some of space’s most memorable vistas.
two galaxies mid collision

2008: Galaxy Collision

Hubble caught these two galaxies mid-collision. One, stretched out in a line. The other, a ring-shaped shockwave of stars. Neither will ever be the same.
The planet Saturn, viewed nearly edge-on, with four of its moons visible in the foreground

2009: Saturn And Four Of Its Moons

Titan—Saturn’s largest moon—is just at the top of the image, casting a shadow near Saturn’s north pole. From our view here on Earth, moons only cross in front of the planet when the rings lie in a nearly flat plane. The alignment, called a ring-plane crossing, happens every 14 or 15 years. Hubble captured a ring-plane crossing in 1995, and this one in 2009. The next will be in 2025—will Hubble still be around then? If not, perhaps its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, will see it.
A bunch of stars and gas, blue in some parts and orange in others

2010: Twenty-Year Spectacular

Hubble’s twentieth anniversary came a year after a dramatic servicing mission in May 2009 that replaced a few of its detectors and repaired others. Astronauts also replaced gyroscopes, computers, and other support equipment on the telescope. Since the space shuttle was to be retired in 2011, astronomers knew this would be the last upgrade Hubble would get—no other spacecraft could carry astronauts high enough. The twentieth-anniversary image is a detail shot of gas and stars in the Carina Nebula, which Hubble had imaged in truly stunning glory a few years earlier.
Blue, white, and orange gas with a delicate filamentary structure in space

2012: A Dying Star

Stars spend most of their lifetimes as stable, solitary, shining orbs. But at their births, as they form from gas and dust, and at their deaths, as they return that gas and dust to into space, they create scenes that Hubble can’t resist photographing. This one is of a star not unlike our sun, in its death throes. Five billion years from now our own sun may be as lovely.