Hubble’s amazing 3D journeys through nebulae and intergalactic space

Although not too many people have seen it for themselves, the Horsehead Nebula, hanging off the belt of the constellation of Orion, is probably one of the best known nebulae, simply because of its photogenic nature. Viewed through a normal, visible-light telescope, the nebula appears as a dark shadow of a horse's head (thanks to pareidolia), but in infrared light, the details of the nebula pop out at us. The team at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) took Hubble's infrared view of the nebula, along with shots from the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) at the European Southern Observatory in Chile for contrast, to produce a three-dimensional view that we can zoom through in the video above.

If you own a pair of anaglyph 3D glasses (the red/blue kind), you can check out a neat stereoscopic 3D view of the video here.

With that done, the astronomers turned their attention to another nebula, star-forming region Sharpless 2-106 in the constellation of Cygnus. This nebula has also been called the Celestial Snow Angel, due to the two giant lobes of gas and dust that surround the central star (simply called 'Infrared Source 4'), which look like angels wings. This time, the team coupled Hubble's views of the nebula with those from the Subaru Infrared Telescope, at the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, to give us a 3D look at it as the video flies us through the stars towards it:

The anaglyph 3D version of the video can be seen here.

Finally (at least for now), the astronomers went deep, taking Hubble's amazing eXtreme Deep Field (HXDF) view of the universe, captured in 2012, and combining it with the Ultra Deep Field view it gathered eight years earlier. Even though both views were taken by the same telescope, in the same orbit around Earth during those eight years, our solar system has moved a considerable distance through the galaxy in that time, giving just enough of an offset to give the astronomers what they needed to construct the 3D model to fly us through:

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The Hubble Space Telescope has been orbiting above the earth for nearly 24 years now, making it a veteran space explorer. Its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), will no doubt blow away the images Hubble has taken, not only with the unprecedented detail it will allow us to view the universe in, but also in exactly how far away (and how far back in time) it will let us look. However, since the JWST isn't scheduled to launch until 2018, we still have at least four years of amazing imagery and discoveries from Hubble until then. I, for one, am looking forward to it!

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