AWESOME Photos! Hubble Space Telescope Celebrates 20 Years

The beauty of the universe is almost indescribable. After entering the NASA site below, scroll down a bit and click to view all 35 photos. Like the picture you see here, these images are stunning! All images are high-resolution and may be downloaded in different sizes. If you are an artist, these will stimulate your imagination.  If you want to contemplate God's handiwork, this is a good place to do that.

Starry-Eyed Hubble Celebrates 20 Years of Awe and Discovery

April 22, 2010: NASA's best-recognized, longest-lived, and most prolific space observatory zooms past a threshold of 20 years of operation this month. On April 24, 1990, the space shuttle and crew of STS-31 were launched to deploy the Hubble Space Telescope into a low Earth orbit. What followed was one of the most remarkable sagas of the space age. Hubble's unprecedented capabilities made it one of the most powerful science instruments ever conceived by humans, and certainly the one most embraced by the public. Hubble discoveries revolutionized nearly all areas of current astronomical research, from planetary science to cosmology. And, its pictures were unmistakably out of this world. This brand new Hubble photo is of a small portion of one of the largest seen star-birth regions in the galaxy, the Carina Nebula. Towers of cool hydrogen laced with dust rise from the wall of the nebula. The scene is reminiscent of Hubble's classic "Pillars of Creation" photo from 1995, but is even more striking in appearance. The image captures the top of a three-light-year-tall pillar of gas and dust that is being eaten away by the brilliant light from nearby bright stars. The pillar is also being pushed apart from within, as infant stars buried inside it fire off jets of gas that can be seen streaming from towering peaks like arrows sailing through the air.