ann2501 — Announcement

Announcement of the ESA/Hubble 35th anniversary calendar

27 January 2025

On 24 April 1990, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope was sent into orbit aboard the space shuttle Discovery as the first space telescope of its kind. An incredible 35 years later, Hubble is more active and productive than ever. Each year of its mission has been marked by a breathtaking image newly released for the occasion. 

Now, ESA/Hubble is releasing a commemorative calendar for 2025, “Highlights from 35 Years of Discovery”, that looks back over a small selection of these anniversary images, taking us through the history and the highlights of the work done with Hubble. 

The calendar features images from a selection of past anniversaries between 1998 and 2024. These include imagery of nebulae, star clusters, galaxies, and more. It can now be accessed electronically for anyone to print, share and enjoy (please see the links provided below).

The images featured in the calendar are as follows:

Cover: The glittering tapestry of young stars flaring to life in this image aptly resembles an exploding shell in a fireworks display. A giant cluster of about 3000 stars called Westerlund 2, it contains some of the brightest, hottest and most massive stars ever discovered. Their fierce radiation and powerful winds are responsible for the weird and wonderful shapes of the clouds of gas and dust in this image.

January: Also known as NGC 7635, the Bubble Nebula is an emission nebula located 8 000 light-years away. The almost perfectly symmetrical shell is the result of a powerful flow of gas — known as stellar wind — from the bright star visible just to the left of centre.

February: The galaxy NGC 4298 is seen almost face-on, showing us its spiral arms, blue patches of ongoing star formation and young stars. In the edge-on disc of NGC 4302, huge swathes of dust are responsible for the mottled brown patterns. Both are 55 million light-years away.

March: This amazing and colourful image shows the Lagoon Nebula. The whole nebula, about 4 000 light-years away, is an incredible 55 light-years wide and 20 light-years tall. This image shows only a small part of this turbulent star-formation region, about four light-years across.

April: M76, the colourful Little Dumbbell Nebula, is a planetary nebula created by a collapsing red giant star. Hot, vibrant gases are propelled outwards by the now white-dwarf’s stellar winds; the red colour is from nitrogen, and blue is from oxygen.

May: This image of Saturn, taken in 1998 with the then-new Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS), shows the planet's reflected infrared light. This view provides detailed information on the clouds and hazes in Saturn's atmosphere: different colours represent several wavelengths of infrared light reflected from various cloud layers.

June: Messier 82 is a galaxy remarkable for the webs of shredded clouds and flame-like plumes of glowing hydrogen blasting out from its central regions. A starburst galaxy, throughout its central region young stars are being born ten times faster than in our Milky Way galaxy.

July: This image features the star-forming nebula NGC 1333 in the Perseus molecular cloud. Hubble’s colourful view, showcasing its unique ability to obtain images in light from ultraviolet to near-infrared, unveils an effervescent cauldron of gases and dust stirred up by newly forming stars within the dark cloud.

August: This menagerie — named the Hickson Compact Group 40 — includes three spiral-shaped galaxies, an elliptical galaxy and a lenticular (lens-like) galaxy. Somehow, these different galaxies have crossed paths to create an exceptionally crowded and eclectic galaxy sampler. This snapshot shows them falling together before their inevitable merger.

September: This image is one of the most photogenic examples of the many turbulent stellar nurseries the Hubble Space Telescope has observed during its 35-year lifetime. The portrait features the giant nebula NGC 2014 and its neighbour NGC 2020, which together form part of a vast star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

October: Mystic Mountain, this scene of a turbulent cosmic pinnacle in the Carina Nebula, has become one of Hubble’s most famous and enduring images since its release. Even more dramatic than fiction, it captures the chaotic activity atop a pillar of gas and dust, three light-years tall, which is being eaten away by the brilliant light from nearby bright stars.

November: The interaction between a pair of stars at its centre, a red giant and a white dwarf, causes eruptions of material which become the delicate form of the Southern Crab Nebula. Hubble images revealed the details of the nebula’s nested inner structure for the first time.

December: The giant star in this image is waging a tug-of-war between gravity and radiation to avoid self-destruction. Called AG Carinae, it’s surrounded by an expanding shell of gas and dust — a nebula, about five light-years wide — that is shaped by the powerful winds of the star.

Please note that hard copies are not available directly from ESA/Hubble. We invite you to avail yourself of the free calendar formats below.

Links

• Print-Ready Calendar File
• High Resolution Digital Calendar File
• Low Resolution Digital Calendar File
• Hubble35 webpage
• 2025 ESA/Hubble/Webb Calendar

Contacts

ESA/Webb & ESA/Hubble Chief Science Communications Officer
E-mail: [email protected]