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1 of 20Aleppo, Syria, May 26, 2013 – The Citadel of Aleppo – medieval fortified palaceDigitalGlobe—Getty Images -
2 of 20Belfast, Northern Ireland, Nov. 3, 2013 – “Wish,” a large-scale art workDigitalGlobe—Getty Images -
3 of 20Utah, USA, April 22, 2013 – Colorado RiverDigitalGlobe—Getty Images -
4 of 20Cuanza River, Angola, April 28, 2013 – Cambambe DamDigitalGlobe—Getty Images -
5 of 20Doha, Qatar, March 4, 2013 – Artificial island spanning nearly four million sq meters.DigitalGlobe—Getty Images -
6 of 20Dunalley, Australia, Jan. 6, 2013 – fires, false color image (red = healthy vegetation)DigitalGlobe—Getty Images -
7 of 20Australia, April 22, 2013 – Great Barrier ReefDigitalGlobe—Getty Images -
8 of 20Gwadar coast, Pakistan Sept. 29, 2013 – new island created by earthquake in PakistanDigitalGlobe—Getty Images -
9 of 20Croatia, Feb. 16, 2013 – Galešnjak (Island of Love)DigitalGlobe—Getty Images -
10 of 20Hong Kong, China May 9, 2013 – giant rubber duckDigitalGlobe—Getty Images -
11 of 20Madang Province, Papua New Guinea, March 22, 2013 – Manam VolcanoDigitalGlobe—Getty Images -
12 of 20Namib Desert, Namibia, May 13, 2013 – Sossusvlie areaDigitalGlobe—Getty Images -
13 of 20Naples, Italy, Feb. 19 2013 – Mount VesuviusDigitalGlobe—Getty Images -
14 of 20Niger, Feb. 13, 2013 – Arlit Uranium MineDigitalGlobe—Getty Images -
15 of 20Schooner Cays, Bahamas, May 26, 2013DigitalGlobe—Getty Images -
16 of 20Sochi, Russia, March 17, 2013 – Site of 2014 winter OlympicsDigitalGlobe—Getty Images -
17 of 20Near the city of Sur, Oman, Feb. 13, 2013 – massive “green tide”DigitalGlobe—Getty Images -
18 of 20Valencia, Spain, July 19, 2013 – Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia and Gulliver Park with an enormous fiberglass model of Lemuel Gulliver trappedDigitalGlobe—Getty Images -
19 of 20Versailles, France, Aug. 20, 2013 – Palace of VersaillesDigitalGlobe—Getty Images -
20 of 20Xi'an, China, Sept. 24, 2013 – Shiyuan ParkDigitalGlobe—Getty Images
The best space machines reveal their purpose with a single glance. The gangly, leggy lunar module could only have been a crude contraption designed to land on another world. A rocket, any rocket, could only be a machine designed to fly—fast, high and violently.
And so it is with the Hubble Space Telescope—a bright silver, 43 ft. (13 m) long, 14 ft. (4.2 m) diameter cylinder, with a wide open eye at one end and a flap-like eyelid that, for practical purposes never, ever closes. Since shortly after its launch on April 24, 1990, that eye has stared and stared and stared into the deep, and in the 25 years it’s been on watch, it has revealed that deep to be richer, lovelier and more complex than science ever imagined.
Hubble started off sickly, a long-awaited, breathlessly touted, $1.5 billion machine that was supposed to change astronomy forever from almost the moment it went into space, and might have too if its celebrated 94.5 in. (2.4 m) primary mirror that had been polished to tolerances of just 10 nanometers—or 10 one-billionths of a meter—hadn’t turned out to be nearsighted, warped by the equivalent of 1/50th the thickness of a sheet of paper. It would be three and a half years before a fix could be devised and built and flown to orbit and shuttle astronauts could set the myopic mirror right. And then, on January 13, 1994, the newly sharpened eye blinked open, the cosmos appeared before it and the first of one million observations the telescope has made since then began pouring back to Earth.
Some of Hubble’s images have become cultural icons—Pillars of Creation, the Horsehead Nebula. Some have thrilled only scientists. All have been mile-markers in the always-maturing field of astronomy. The fifty images that follow are just a sampling of the telescope’s vast body of work. Hubble still has close to a decade of life left to it. That means a great deal more work and a great many more images—before the metal eyelid closes forever.
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