Happy Birthday!

to the Hubble space telescope, 

 this year it is 28 years old, on April 24, 1990, Hubble finally launched into orbit aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery, and to celebrate NASA have released this picture in the heart of the Lagoon Nebula, at the center of the photo, a monster young star 200,000 times brighter than our Sun is blasting powerful ultraviolet radiation and hurricane-like stellar winds, carving out a fantasy landscape of ridges, cavities, and mountains of gas and dust, 

and here the same image taken using an infrared camera, the most obvious difference between Hubble’s infrared and visible photos of this region is the abundance of stars that fill the infrared field of view, most of them are more distant, background stars located behind the nebula itself. However, some of these pinpricks of light are young stars within the Lagoon Nebula, the giant star Herschel 36, near the center of the frame, shines even brighter in this infrared view, 

this video zooms into the core of a rich star-birth region of the  Lagoon Nebula, located in the constellation Sagittarius in the direction of our Milky Way galaxy’s central bulge, amazing.