Hubble space telescope turns 25. Here are 25 of its most mind-blowing photos

THE Hubble Space Telescope has been taking unforgettable pictures of the most far flung corners of the universe for 25 years. Here are 25 of the best.

THE Hubble Space Telescope has been taking unforgettable pictures of the most far flung and freaky corners of the universe for 25 years.

Carried by the Shuttle Discovery, Hubble was launched on April 24, 1990 and deployed the following day.

Stranger than fiction ... This craggy fantasy mountaintop enshrouded by wispy clouds looks like a bizarre landscape from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image captures the chaotic activity atop a pillar of gas and dust, three light-years tall, which is being eaten away by the brilliant light from nearby bright stars.

Two months later, after analysing the telescope’s first pictures, astronomers discovered that the telescope had “blurred vision,” caused by a tiny distortion in the 2.4-meter primary mirror.

Breathtaking ... voted number one by British scientists as the best picture taken by the Hubble telescope, this is the Sombrero galaxy, 28 million light years from Earth.

The problem was eventually fixed and by 1993, Hubble was beginning to send back images of the universe we had never seen before.

GALLERY: 25 years of Hubble images

Hubble’s orbit outside the distortion of Earth’s atmosphere allows it to take extremely high-resolution images with negligible background light. Hubble has recorded some of the most detailed visible-light images ever, allowing a deep view into space and time.

Another observation, called the Hubble Deep Field, allows astronomers to see to the edge of the universe.

In orbit ... the Hubble Space Telescope, pictured in 1997.

The telescope has generated a steady stream of discoveries, ranging from a more precise determination of the age of the universe — 13.7 billion years — to confirmation of the existence of supermassive black holes.

In recent years, Hubble’s razor-sharp vision has played a key role in the ongoing effort to probe the nature of dark energy, capturing the light from ancient supernovas to chart the accelerating expansion of the cosmos.

The telescope is still operating, and may last until 2020. Its scientific successor, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), is scheduled for launch in 2018.

Pretty in pink ... failed stars, baby stars and vast cosmic canyons of dust and gas were on display in this Hubble Space Telescope image released by NASA depicting the Orion Nebula on January 11, 2006.