ann2101 — Announcement

Release of the 2021 ESA/Hubble Calendar

1 January 2021

To celebrate another year of exciting images and discoveries from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, ESA/Hubble has released a new calendar for 2021. Titled The Latest Spectacular images from the Cosmos, the calendar features a selection of images from photo releases and Pictures of the Week published throughout 2020.

The 2021 calendar features Hubble imagery of planets, star clusters, galaxies, and more. It can now be accessed electronically for anyone to print, share and enjoy. The images featured in the calendar are described below:

Cover: Hubble’s 30th anniversary image features the giant nebula NGC 2014 and its neighbour NGC 2020, which together form part of a vast star-forming region approximately 163 000 light-years away.

January: Galaxy UGC 2885, which resides 232 million light-years away, may be the largest in the local universe. It is 2.5 times wider than our Milky Way and contains 10 times as many stars.

February: The globular cluster NGC 1805 is a tight grouping of thousands of stars located near the edge of the Large Magellanic Cloud. The stars orbit closely to one another, like bees swarming around a hive.

March: The spiral galaxy NGC 1589 was once the scene of a violent bout of cosmic hunger pangs; a hapless star was torn apart and devoured by the ravenous supermassive black hole at the centre of the galaxy.

April: The captivating galaxy NGC 2525, residing roughly 70 million light-years from Earth, showcases a brilliant supernova. Visible as a bright blue point in the left of the image, Hubble observed the supernova for one year as of February 2018.

May: This image showcases a special class of star-forming nursery known as Free-floating Evaporating Gaseous Globules, or frEGGs for short. This object is formally known as J025157.5+600606.

June: The young star HBC 672 is known by its nickname of Bat Shadow because of its wing-like shadow feature. The star resides in a stellar nursery called the Serpens Nebula, about 1300 light-years away.

July: This image features a small section of the Cygnus supernova blast wave, located around 2400 light-years away. The name of the supernova remnant comes from its position in the northern constellation of Cygnus (The Swan).

August: These latest views of Jupiter were captured when the planet was 653 million kilometres from Earth and provided researchers with an updated weather report on the monster planet’s turbulent atmosphere.

September: The vast swathes of tell-tale blue seen throughout the galaxy NGC 1792 indicate areas that are full of young, hot stars, and it is in the shades of orange at the centre where the older, cooler stars reside.

October: This image shows a region of space called LHA 120-N150. It is a substructure of the gigantic Tarantula Nebula, which is situated more than 160 000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

November: This Hubble image features the galaxy LRG-3-817, also known as SDSS J090122.37 + 181432.3. The galaxy’s appearance is distorted by the effects of gravitational lensing and it is visible as a long arc to the left of the central galaxy cluster.

December: The spiral pattern shown by the galaxy NGC 2775 is striking because of its delicate, feathery nature. There is virtually no star formation in the central part of the galaxy, which is dominated by an unusually large and relatively empty galactic bulge.