The image at the beginning of this article is NGC 6302, a dying star at 3,800 light years from us. This stellar butterfly is formed by the material ejected from the star, a gas hell that roars at 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit, travelling at 600,000 miles an hour. Not a good place to spend your next vacation, but one heck of a view. [NASA]
tero
Thursday, September 10, 2009 at 3:17 PM@gaiking That would be like pointing an 800mm SLR camera lens at an object a centimetre away. The lenses on Hubble (and the powerful ground-based telescopes for that matter) are designed to crisply focus objects that are very far away – try to focus on something too close, and it would be nothing but blur, and impossible to focus on.