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happy 23rd birthday hubble

Hubble celebrates 23 years on the job with a Horsehead of a different color

NASA / ESA / AURA / STScI

The Horsehead Nebula shines in a Hubble Space Telescope image that marks this month's 23rd anniversary of the orbiting observatory's launch.

By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News

Astronomers have come out with a Horsehead Nebula of a different color to celebrate the Hubble Space Telescope's 23rd birthday.

The iconic nebula in the constellation Orion, about 1,500 light-years away, can be seen even through small telescopes. In visible light, it's a dark dust cloud in the shape of a horse's head, silhouetted against a backdrop of glowing hydrogen gas. But the Horsehead takes on a completely different look in the new view released Friday.

"This image was taken in the infrared," Joe Liske, an astronomer from the European Southern Observatory, explains in a video introducing the picture. "In infrared light, we can pierce right through some of the bulky plumes of dusty material which usually mask and obscure the inner regions of the Horsehead. The result is this rather fragile-looking structure, made of delicate, wispy folds of gas — very different to the nebula's appearance in the visible."

http://cosmiclog.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/04/19/17828652-hubble-celeb...