Experiencing Hubble: Understanding the Greatest Images of the Universe

The scientific stories behind 10 of the most fascinating images made by the Hubble Space Telescope; Hubble's design; how its operations were almost cut short by a flaw in its mirror, a problem corrected during a space shuttle servicing mission.

Shortly after its optics are repaired, Hubble has the opportunity to observe the solar system event of the century; the collision of a string of comets with Jupiter in 1994, examining Hubble's image of the aftermath of this crash.

Hubble's view of a tiny region of the Sagittarius Star Cloud has 12,000 stars; studying this image; learning how its unprecedented resolution is helping to chart the stellar history and evolution of the Milky Way galaxy.

Hubble's photo of the glowing pillars of gas and dust at the core of the Eagle Nebula; resembling a fantasy landscape, this view shows young stars emerging from their cocoons of gas and dust in an interstellar molecular cloud.

Turning from star birth to star death; getting a preview of the sun's distant future by examining the Cat's Eye Nebulae; such planetary nebulae are the exposed debris of dying stars; they are among the most beautiful objects in the Hubble gallery.

At the end of their lives, stars bigger than the sun disintegrate in an explosion known as a supernova; Hubble's image of the Crab Nebula shows the expanding cloud of material from a supernova witnessed on Earth in the year 1054.

In the 1920s, astronomer Edwin Hubble discovers the true nature of galaxies as "island universes"; some 80 years later, the telescope named in his honor makes thousands of pictures of galaxies, focusing on an edge-on view of the Sombrero galaxy.

Hubble's image of NGC 3370 includes faint galaxies in the background; the telescope's mission to establish an accurate distance scale to galaxies; the expansion rate of the universe; how Hubble's success leads to the concept of dark energy.

A pair of interacting galaxies called the Antennae represent Hubble's most dramatic snapshot of a galactic collision; how such events unfold; how the Andromeda Galaxy will have a similar encounter with the Milky Way in the far distant future.

A consequence of Einstein's general theory of relativity is evident in Hubble's picture of Abell 2218; investigating the physics of this phenomenon, called gravitational lensing; how Hubble uses it to study distant galaxies and dark matter.

Completing the tour of Hubble's images, plunging into the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, the deepest optical image of the cosmos made to date, this view shows 10,000 galaxies extending far beyond the Milky Way and back to the epoch of galaxy formation.

Looking at the future of Hubble; the next generation of space telescopes; focusing on the search for extrasolar planets; how they are found; the role Hubble and other telescopes play in extending humans' knowledge of possibly Earth-like worlds.