Optical and ultraviolet images are combined to show auroras on Jupiter.

For 30 years and counting, the Hubble Space Telescope has taken us on a journey through the cosmos from auroras on Jupiter to some of the earliest galaxies in the universe.

"It's just given us an extraordinary window on the universe that really has been unmatched ... by ground-based telescopes, said Fred Watson, Australia's Astronomer-at-large.

Since it was launched on 24 April 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope has captured hundreds of thousands of stunning images.

"The science that comes out of the pretty pictures is amazing," Professor Watson said.

Named after astronomer Edwin Hubble, the telescope's original mission was to peer into deep space to help resolve a long-standing debate about how fast the Universe was expanding.

After an initial hiccup with its lens, which was fixed by astronauts in 1993, scientists soon realised the telescope could portray the universe in exquisite detail.

Hovering 568 kilometres above Earth, Hubble is not hampered by the atmosphere.

On board the telescope is a raft of cameras that can take images in different wavelengths — optical, infrared and ultraviolet — as well as instruments that can detect the temperature, mass, metallicity and atmosphere of distant stars and planets.

The image above of Jupiter is one of Professor Watson's 10 favourite images from the past 30 years.

It was taken in 2016 as part of a series of images preparing for the arrival of the Juno spacecraft.

"Hubble's superb imaging qualities in visible light reveal the planet's turbulent cloud belts and its Great Red Spot, a long-lived cyclone, but additional imagery in the ultraviolet spectrum shows swirls of light in its northern Arctic," Professor Watson explained.

When the Hubble Space Telescope is finally retired sometime within the decade, nothing will rival its capacity to take high resolution ultraviolet images.

Pillars of Creation

Optical and infrared view of the Pillars of Creation Share Visible light image of the Pillars of Creation Share An infrared image of the Pillars of Creation taken by the Hubble Telescope

These towering pillars some 6,500 light years away in the Eagle Nebula in the constellation of Orion have become one of Hubble's most iconic images.

The clouds, dubbed the Pillars of Creation, are formed by newborn stars pumping out dust and excited gas.

While the visual light image, released in 2014, captures the colours of different gases in the clouds, the infrared reveals the fine structure.

"It's mind blowing," Professor Watson said.

"The infrared radiation penetrates dust, turning the dense pillars into wispy outlines and revealing the newborn stars at their tips.

"The opaque dusty background is magically swept away to uncover a glittering field of stars beyond."

Glittering stars in Lyra

Share A field of stars and a couple of galaxies (top left) in the constellation of Lyra

This radiantly beautiful starscape is located in the Northern Hemisphere constellation of Lyra and about 13,300 light years away.

Released in 2008, this image shows the central area in an 'open cluster' of 10,000 stars dubbed NGC 6791.

"While this is a particularly rich open cluster, you can still see right through it to distant galaxies far beyond in the upper left of the image."

At around 8 billion years, this is the oldest open cluster we've yet discovered.

Mysterious Monocerotis

Share The light echo around the star V838 Monocerotis as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope in September 2006.

This tangled mass of swirling debris is not quite what it seems. At the centre of the image is a bright orange star called V838 Monocerotis.

In 2002, the star, which lies about 20,000 light years away in the constellation of Monoceros aka the Unicorn, suddenly exploded then faded back to its usual level of brightness.

"The effect of this was to produce an expanding shell of light around the star, illuminating successive regions of the complex dust-clouds surrounding it."

Hubble captured this image four-and-a-half years after the outburst.

M81: the perfect spiral galaxy

Share Spiral galaxy M81

The pearl of the northern sky, M81 lies 11.6 million light years away in the constellation of Ursa Major or the Major She-Bear.

It is so perfect it is known as a 'grand-design' spiral galaxy.

From this angle, released in 2007, we can see from the ancient yellow stars in the central bulge to the young blue stars in its outer spiral arms.

"Even though it's so far away, the extraordinary imaging capability of Hubble teases out detailed structure in the galaxy's brownish dust-lanes, shows compact clouds of luminous gas in its spiral arms, and clearly reveals individual stars."

Clusters of galaxies

Share Distant galaxy cluster Abell 370 is one of the first where scientists saw the phenomenon of gravitational lensing.

This stunning image eloquently portrays the complexity of the Universe on the large scale.

Abell 370 is a rich cluster of galaxies lying around 4 billion light years away in the constellation of Cetus the Whale.

Galaxy clusters are the most massive objects in the Universe.

"They warp the space around them so much that they can magnify more remote galaxies along the same line of sight by the process known as gravitational lensing."

"Hubble gives us insights into galaxies that by rights we should not be able to observe."

The strange arcs of light in this image, taken in 2017, are distant galaxies twice as far away as Abell 370.

The bright streak to the left of the centre is the elongated image of a distant spiral galaxy, which was one of the first gravitationally lensed galaxies discovered.

Tarantula and a butterfly

Share This region of space called LHA 120-N150 is a substructure of the gigantic Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

This cloud of young stars and gas dwells in the suburbs of the biggest star nursery in our part of the universe.

The nebula, known as LHA 120-N150, is part of the Tarantula Nebula that lies 165,000 light years away in a dwarf galaxy known as the Large Magellanic Cloud.

This image, released in 2020, captures the iridescent butterfly created by the dust lane that delineates the two halves of the nebula.

"It's not a particularly spectacular object, but it's seen against a glittering backdrop of stars, with the four brightest ones forming a colourful parallelogram in which the nebula is perfectly centred.

"The symmetry reminds me of art deco jewellery."

An Einstein cross

Share Hubble image showing a perfect Einstein cross formation out of four images of a quasar.

It looks like a quintet of bright stars, in a field of galaxies.

But what you're looking at in this image released in 2017 is the result of a subtle interaction between gravity and light over distances of billions of light years.

This phenomenon, which is based on Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, is known as an Einstein Cross.

"What you're seeing in that quintet is actually four images of the same remote object, formed because the object in the centre distorts the space around it and acts like a crude lens."

The galaxy at the centre of the cross is about the same distance away from us as the other galaxies dotted around the image.

The quadrupled image around it is a distant quasar — the dense core of a delinquent galaxy that shines very brightly from energy spewing out of a supermassive black hole — around 7 billion light years away.

"The light of each of its four images has taken a different path through the gravitational lens of the foreground galaxy."

Remnants of an exploding star

Hubble widefield and close-up composite view of Supernova 1987a Share Hubble widefield view of Supernova 1987a remnant Share Close-up view of Supernova 1987a taken by three telescopes: Hubble optical (green ring), ALMA submillimetre (red), Chandra X-ray (blue)

Early in 1987, in another part of the Tarantula Nebula, an exploding star produced the first naked-eye supernova for almost 400 years

"By the time Hubble was launched, the supernova had faded back into obscurity, but the new telescope allowed its remnant to be probed."

The remnant appears as the small eye-shaped feature against a carpet of stars and gas in the centre of the most recent widefield view, released in 2017.

A close-up view, which combines images from two other telescopes in different light wavelengths, shows the green ring of light caused by the shock wave from the explosion smashing into material previously ejected by the star.

"Two fainter rings suggest that the supernova remnant sits at the centre of an hourglass of debris, with the bright ring corresponding to its waist," Professor Watson explained.

Extreme universe

Share Hubble extreme deep field is the deepest image of the Universe ever made.

This remarkable image, known as the eXtreme Deep Field image, captures the dawn of time.

"The light from the faintest of these galaxies has been travelling for 13.2 billion of the Universe's 13.7 billion year history: a statistic that testifies to the extraordinary imaging capability of Hubble."

To create the image, released in 2012, the telescope stared at the same tiny patch of sky for a total of 23 days, revealing 5500 galaxies in the distant universe.

"Remarkably, the image traces the evolution of galaxies from ragged formless objects at the limit of detectability, seen perhaps only half a billion years after the Big Bang, to spiral galaxies like those in today's universe."