Hubble Captures First-Ever Shot of Star

• NASA released seven new Hubble photos Sept. 9 taken by the 19-year-old newly refurbished space telescope. The first snapshots from the refurbished Hubble showcase colorful multi-wavelength pictures of far-flung galaxies, a densely packed star cluster, an eerie "pillar of creation," and a "butterfly" nebula.
  This undated handout image provided by NASA, released Sept. 9, was taken by the refurbished Hubble Space Telescope and shows a clash among members of a famous galaxy quintet revealing an assortment of stars across a wide color range, from young, blue stars to aging, red stars. This portrait of Stephan's Quintet, also known as Hickson Compact Group 92, was taken by the new Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) aboard NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Three of the galaxies have distorted shapes, elongated spiral arms, and long, gaseous tidal tails containing myriad star clusters. The image, taken in visible and near-infrared light, showcases WFC3's broad wavelength range.
  
  
  

  NASA / AP

• This celestial object that looks like a delicate butterfly actually shows roiling cauldrons of gas heated to more than 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The gas is tearing across space at more than 600,000 miles an hour -- fast enough to travel from Earth to the Moon in 24 minutes.
  
  
  

  NASA / AP

• Stars burst to life in the chaotic Carina Nebula, observed in ultraviolet / visible light. The Space Shuttle Atlantis mission earlier this summer returned the shuttle to the Hubble Space Telescope for one last visit before the shuttle fleet retires in 2010. Over 11 days and five spacewalks, the shuttle Atlantis' crew made repairs and upgrades to the telescope.
  
  
  

  NASA / AP

• The Hubble Space Telescope's newly repaired Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) has peered nearly 5 billion light-years away to show intricate details in the galaxy cluster Abell 370. Abell 370 is one of the very first galaxy clusters where astronomers observed the phenomenon of gravitational lensing, where the warping of space by the cluster's gravitational field distorts the light from galaxies lying far behind it. This is can be seen as arcs and streaks in the picture, which are the stretched images of background galaxies.
  
  
  

  NASA / AP

• The barred spiral galaxy NGC 6217 was photographed on June 13 and July 8, 2009, and released on Sept. 9, as part of the initial testing and calibration of Hubble's ACS. The galaxy lies 6 million light-years away in the north circumpolar constellation Ursa Major.
  
  
  

  NASA / AP

• This panoramic view shows a colorful assortment of 100,000 stars residing in the crowded core of a giant star cluster. The image reveals a small region inside the massive globular cluster Omega Centauri, which contains nearly 10 million stars.
  
  
  

  NASA / AP

• This Hubble picture, taken on July 23, 2009, and released on Sept. 9, is the sharpest visible-light picture of Jupiter since the New Horizons spacecraft flew by that planet in 2007.
  
  
  

  NASA / AP