Hubble Space Telescope has snapped some amazing images in its time out in dark, cold space. But most of the hundreds of thousands of images its taken have never been seen by the public. Here are some images processed by amateurs and shown for the first time.
Via Hubble Space Telescope:
Hubble has made over a million observations since launch, but only a small proportion are attractive images — and an even smaller number are ever actually seen by anyone outside the small groups of scientists that publish them. But the vast amount of data in the archive means that there are still many hundreds of beautiful images scattered among the valuable, but visually unattractive, scientific data that have never been enjoyed by the public.
We call these pictures Hubble’s hidden treasures, and a few months ago, we invited the public to look through Hubble’s science archive to help us find them.
The response was impressive, with almost 3000 submissions. More than a thousand of these images were fully processed: a difficult and time-consuming task. We’ve already started featuring the best of these in our Hubble Picture of the Week series.
Here’s to Hubble, and to space. And hopefully, we’ll be peering even deeper into the cosmos starting in 2018 or soon thereafter, with the James Webb Space Telescope.
