[Closed] Happy 30th Birthday Hubble!🎉

That’s an amazing photo the actual size is incomprehensible though.

Missed the start but re-started from the beginning on iplayer. Excellent programme. Always blown away by the images from Hubble.

The scale of the pictures it takes. The size of the objects (in light years) and the amount of light years away.

It's beyond comprehension. We can't be alone in this huge universe can we?

Pah! Fake images, don't you know the universe is flat!
The size and distances of the galaxies and systems are too much for my tiny brain to comprihend.

Will watch later on catch-up but some truly amazing images in the BBC article.
The technology and interstellar distances are staggering.
When Cheops, JWST and Hubble are all up there and gathering data....who knows what we'll find?

Wow, 30 years already? I can vaguely recall the launch and subsequent technical issues regarding blurred photos!

Wow, 30 years already? I can vaguely recall the launch and subsequent technical issues regarding blurred photos!

Same here! Was just as I was starting secondary school, I remember watching it on John Craven's Newsround!

The programme was amazing (although a bit more in depth science around the imagery would have been good) and the images mind blowing. That kind of scale just doesn't add up, it's difficult to comprehend gas clouds that are 30 TRILLION km high!

Incredible stuff thanks for the PSA and the iplayer programme. My son (7) loves all of this but I have such difficulty explaining it to him, as the concept of these sort of distances and time and very difficult to grasp, for both of us!

Watched it mind blowing.

Remember watching horizon in 1990 with my dad about it....

Anyone got any good books about the shuttle

I saw a film about the Hubble on IMAX a few yrs ago - the images that machine is capable of capturing are truly mind-blowing.

The OP’s image, I think comes at the end of the film & the camera pulls back....& just keeps pulling back till that gas cloud is a mere spec - but that gas cloud is absolutely vast & the detail it can be seen in is staggering particularly when you realise from how far away the image was captured.

Truly a wondrous thing.

Mind boggling to comprehend. These guys have an incredible ability to park human scale perceptions and think at that scale.

Left me sad that with all this knowledge and ability we still can't manage the tiny planet we live on without buggering it (and our existence on it) up.

I wanted to put that that image of billions of lights worth of galaxies into a scale i could kind of comprehend. Wikipedia blew my mind. It is 'smaller than 1 sq. mm piece of paper held at 1 meter away, and equal to roughly one twenty-six-millionth of the total area of the sky.' 😳

It just shows what America and the world is capable of when we set our minds to it.

Indeed. It spent five years sitting in a warehouse with an incorrectly ground mirror that nobody thought to check, before being launched. It was due originally on the shuttle after Challenger. And pity the poor scientists who’s career work was the high speed photometer.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrective_Optics_Space_Telescope_Axial_Replacement

Some great science has come out of it since though. But modern telescopes have superseded its performance, so I guess it’s going to go the way of Skylab?

‘smaller than 1 sq. mm piece of paper held at 1 meter away, and equal to roughly one twenty-six-millionth of the total area of the sky.’ 😳

That's why they call it space - there's a lot of it!

"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”

One man understood it 😊

Watched it last night on iPlayer. Amazing.

The size of the Pillars of Creation beggars belief - the largest is about 4 light years long/high which is the same distance from the sun to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri.