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Image from Hubble Telescope
New images taken by the long exposure Hubble Space Telescope have recently been released showing a spiral galaxy, known as NGC4911, which lies more than 320 million miles away from Earth – and what a thing of beauty it is!
The distant galaxy contains rich lanes of dust and gas near its centre, silhouetted against newborn star clusters and shimmering pink clouds of hydrogen indicating ongoing star formation.

The high resolution of Hubble’s cameras, together with an incredibly long exposure time of 28 hours, has also captured the outer spiral arms of NGC4911, along with many thousands of other galaxies of differing proportions.

The Hubble Space Telescope, named after astronomer Edwin Hubble, was put into orbit back in 1990 and has been transmitting some breathtaking pictures ever since. It is expected to continue functioning until at least 2014, after which time it will be replaced by its ‘successor’, the James Webb Space Telescope.

If you have a spare few minutes then go and take a look at the Hubble website and browse through the huge gallery of images captured thus far – it really is a miracle of technology to be able to see such magnificent images from so far away.

Website address:     http://hubblesite.org/
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