Welcome to our website "Images from the Hubble telescope !"
On this site, you can see pictures taken by the ESA and NASA designed space telescope "Hubble", deferred and placed in orbit in 1990.
Hubble telescope, which is named after the American astronomer Edwin Hubble, is floating in an orbit about 600 kilometres above the earth - outside the earth's atmosphere.
You can get sharper images from a telescope outside the atmosphere than with a ground telescope, since the ground telescopes are disturbed by a phenomenon called "seeing", which among other, causes that stars appear to blink when viewing them.
The germ of the Hubble telescope were sown back in the 40's, when the American astronomer Lyman Spitzer proposed that we should have a telescope placed outside the earth's atmosphere, to obtain better image resolution.
Anyhow, the knowledge how to defer a telescope in orbit, goes back to early 20s.
Construction of the telescope began in the late 70s.
A variety of repair missions have been carried out in order to service the telescope - the last voyage went in May 2009, with help of the spaceship Atlantis.
The Hubble Space Telescope is considered one of the world's most important astronomical instruments, and its primary mission is to explore the universe - cosmology, stars, planets, and dark holes.
The telescope is planned to be in operation until 2030 - 2040, but another telescope - JWST 'James Webb Space Telescope", is outlined to be launched into orbit 2018.