Hubble is back! The wait is over and here are the new pictures from the newly refurbished Hubble Space Telescope. Above is an image taken by the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), a new camera aboard NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, installed by NASA astronauts in May 2009, during the servicing mission to upgrade and repair the 19-year-old Hubble telescope. This is a planetary nebula, catalogued as NGC 6302, but more popularly called the Bug Nebula or the Butterfly Nebula.
NGC 6302 lies within our Milky Way galaxy, roughly 3,800 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius. The glowing gas is the star’s outer layers, expelled over about 2,200 years. The "butterfly" stretches for more than two light-years, which is about half the distance from the Sun to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri.
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