sci21003 — Announcement

ESA/Hubble Celebrates Telescope’s 31st Anniversary

20 May 2021

Bethany Downer

The Hubble Space Telescope has become a household name over its more than three decades of operation. Each year around 24 April the scientific community and the public alike come together to celebrate Hubble’s remarkable achievements. ESA/Hubble uses this opportunity to develop special initiatives to engage and involve the public in this annual milestone. 

In addition to the special photo release of AG Carinae marking Hubble’s 31st anniversary image, ESA/Hubble announced three public engagement initiatives.

The first of these projects was the launch of the ESA/Hubble GIPHY Account. GIPHY is an online database and search engine that allows users to search for and share short looping videos with no sound that resemble animated GIF files. This collection was developed to be a fun and interactive resource for the general public. Each of the short looping videos can be shared on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, Reddit, text message, email, and more. Learn more about sharing these GIPHY files here. Every looping video on this channel points to the original press release to satisfy one of our top strategic goals to educate the public about the Universe, even through a fun activity. This GIPHY account will continue to be regularly developed and expanded to include new files. Users can enter @esahubble everywhere GIPHY powers a GIF search to find a GIF from the ESA/Hubble channel and/or by searching #Hubble.

Next, we announced the ESA/Hubble Chrome Application, which is now available on the Chrome Web Store. Once installed in the Chrome browser, the user will be randomly shown an image from the ESA/Hubble Top 100 Images collection in each new opened tab. This tool was developed with the intention of inviting the general public to enjoy the variety of beautiful images as they go about their daily activities and interests while browsing the internet.

Keeping the current virtual interactions in mind, the ESA/Hubble team has developed a series of fun initiatives for social media, including a “Which Hubble image are you” Instagram filter, a Facebook frame, virtual meeting backgrounds and smartphone wallpapers. You can learn more about these here.

We also have one more special project in the works that we are excited to announce. We hope this final Hubble 31 initiative will be a fun, informative and educative resource for students, parents, educators, communicators, and the general public alike. Stay tuned to our announcements and social media channels in the coming weeks!

All of the activities surrounding ESA/Hubble’s 31st anniversary celebrations are collected on this page. Please get in touch if you have a suggestion for a video or animation from the ESA/Hubble website that you’d like to see included in this GIPHY collection, or any feedback you may have for our other initiatives. We also invite you to engage with the celebrations on social media using #Hubble31.

Contacts

Bethany Downer
ESA/Hubble Chief Communications Officer
Email: bethany.downer@esahubble.org