Caption Astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to zoom in for a close-up look at one sliver of the Cygnus Loop nebula—a huge bubble of glowing gasses. They found gossamer filaments resembling lines in a wrinkled bedsheet stretched across two light-years. This region lies at the outer edge of the expanding bubble, and was produced by an exploding star 20,000 years ago.
Hubble’s view offers a sneak peek at the dramatic vistas NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope will provide. The most obvious difference between Hubble’s infrared and visible photos of this region is the abundance of stars that fill the infrared field of view. Most of them are more distant, background stars located behind the nebula itself.
The Hubble Space Telescope floats against the background of space as it is released by the Space Shuttle Atlantis after Servicing Mission 4 (SM4, STS-125) on , 7:57 a.m. (CDT).
Hubble's crisp images show that the frequency of spoke apparitions is seasonally driven, first appearing in OPAL data in 2021 but only on the morning (left) side of the rings. Long-term monitoring show that both the number and contrast of the spokes vary with Saturn's seasons.
This picture was taken with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 on , when Saturn was at a distance of roughly 775 million miles (1.25 billion kilometers) from Earth.
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore conducts Hubble science operations.
The Hubble image on the left (unlabeled at top left, labeled at bottom left) shows the beginning of the event, which took place on . From left to right the moons Callisto and Io are above Jupiter's cloud tops.