Vox:
In April 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope — which was launched into orbit exactly 25 years ago — took its most iconic image: the Pillars of Creation. These gigantic towers of dust and gas, 7,000 light years away, are named because the immense force of gravity causes them to condense into clumps of matter that will become new star systems.
In fact, billions of years ago our own solar system may have been born through the same process — so when you look at this upgraded 2014 version of the image, you’re also looking back at the very distant history of Earth.
We’ve all seen this image a hundred times but the details in this story are really fascinating.
It’s an exciting time, that’s for sure. With TESS being launched in 2017 and the James Webb Space Telescope in 2018, it’ll be interesting to see what is discovered. Hopefully we can save the Hubble though. It’d be sad to see it spiral into earths atmosphere.
We used an image of this formation in a supplemental science workbook I designed in a previous decade. It made a great background for the table of contents. 😉
Slight whoops, 2015 – 1995 = 20 not 25. Still Hubble has been one of the greatest ambassadors to space exploration along with the 3 Mars landers and the probes around Jupiter and Saturn that Earth science and NASA has produced.
Hubble was launched 25 years ago. The photo was taken in 1995, 20 years ago.
I’m sure it did! Did you screen it back?
I’d forgotten, so I went back to look at the file. The image was dark and saturated enough to run yellow and white type over. No TOC, actually. Just the intro, masthead, copyright, and image credits.
Sounds good, if you don’t mind entertaining a fellow print/graphic artist/designer/artist/geek additional question. What font(s) did you use? Surely Comic sans and Brush Script in all caps no doubt.
Well it was over ten years ago, so we might be talking Papyrus as well.