In celebration of the Hubble 17th launch date anniversary, astronomers released the largest panoramic photographs every taken by the Hubble's cameras. The Carina Nebula is 50 light years across and shows the birth and death of stars in an unprecedented level of detail (click the image below for a high-res version).
Hubble website has plenty of details of this magnificent nebula: Star birth in the Extreme, Carina Nebula Details, Key to Detail Images.
Hubble recently identified 50,000 evolving galaxies near the Big Dipper.
Read the full article from hubble site and the photo that puts everything in perspective.
I don't think I can get used to how big the Universe is. Ever.
In 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope peered into a blank, uninteresting part of the sky for 10 days. Scientists were searching for possibilities of distant stars. This image was known as the Hubble Deep Field. Later on in September 2003, the Hubble repeated it's attempt at deep space imaging - the Hubble Ultra Deep Field [HUDF].
The results were nothing short of astounding and humbling!
Take a grain of sand and hold it at arms length. That's the size of sky the Hubble was looking at, and in this tiny patch of empty sky, the Hubble discovered 10,000 galaxies. Many of them as far as 78 billion light years away. This is the farthest mankind has ever looked into space.
Our planet revolves around a rather unremarkable star - the Sun - which along with billions of other stars is a part of an unremarkable galaxy - the Milky Way. A piece of unremarkable sky, the size of a grain of sand, holds 10,000 such galaxies. It seems ludicrous to think that the Earth is the only living planet in the Universe.
Wikipedia has more information on HDF and HUDF and the associated research.
